Bonding WAN Connections

[Scott Hanson]

Hello All,

I have bonded T1s together before on a router to get 3Mbps through put instead of 1.5.  Can I do the same with two 50Mbps connections from a cable Internet provider?  I think the T1s had to be provisioned specifically on the ISP side as well as configuration on the router.  So I am not sure if I could do the same on a cable circuit.

Thanks in advance!  All replies rated.

[Richard Burts]

Am I correct in assuming that when you talk about bonding T1s you are actually using PPP multilink to combine them?

The 50 Mbps link from the cable provider is not running PPP and so you can not use the multilink feature on the cable connections. There is not any way to do the same kind of combining links that works on the cable connections. There are some strategies that you might use to get load sharing on both connections, but not any way to bond them so that they appear as a single connection.

HTH

Rick

[Joseph W. Doherty]

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Posting

T1 bonding, MLPPP (?), is usually not used on much "faster" links.  On Ethernet, bonding might be accomplished by using Ethernet port channeling, e.g. LACP, but I don't recall MetroE vendors generally offering that, and cable modems wouldn't, I believe, support it.

However, you can often do routing load sharing across multiple paths, so you very well might be able to take some advange of a couple of cable modems using it.