Q. What is Internet Bonding?

A. 'Bonding' is a term used to describe the technique of combining multiple Internet connections, to virtually create a single Internet connection with higher bandwidth capacity.

There are different bonding methods available including ISP bonding, link-layer (e.g. MLPPP), IP-layer packet-by-packet, or session-by-session (also referred to as load sharing).


Q. How does Downloading data with Bonding work?

A. With uplink bonding, although outgoing packets are spread over multiple Internet connections, the replies will all come in on the connection associated with the IP address of the originating machine. Each outgoing session will be assigned to a particular internet connection.

Downloading data utilises all available links even with using single session download manager (e.g. Windows default Download Manager).


Q. How does Uploading data with Bonding work?

A. When sending (uploading) data from a PC via the Internet, each data packet will travel over each Internet connection in turn, instead of all travelling through a single connection. This speeds up the upload process as the load is shared evenly over the multiple Internet connections, thus increasing the upload bandwidth speed.

As this is simply a routing function, it has no affect on the source or target IP address of each packet, simply the route by which it goes. Therefore it causes no confusion at the receiver’s end, which will simply reply to the source IP address.

However this does not work with some ADSL connections, due to source address filtering.


Q. What is Session Bonding?

A. This is where individual sessions are assigned to individual Internet connections. For example E-mail traffic can utilise one connection and VoIP traffic can utilise the next connection. In organisations where there are many simultaneous end users creating many simultaneous sessions, by sharing the sessions over multiple Internet connections makes full use of the total bandwidth available.

A single session however cannot use more than the available bandwidth of a single Internet connection.


Q. What is Packet Bonding?

A. This is where individual IP packets are sent through individual Internet connections, but the packets are shared over multiple Internet connections.

Packet-by-Packet Bonding is easy for sending data as it is sent over multiple Internet connections, but it gets more difficult for receiving data, as the source on the other end will just use a target IP address that is routed to one of your connections.