Related Pages on the A&A Website:

• www.aaisp.net.uk/broadband-extraline.html

Bonding Overview

An introduction to bonding and what benefits it can bring

IP Settings

Information about how we route IP addresses over bonded lines

Bonding for more speed

Information on how bonding can help improve upload and download speeds

Bonding for resilience

How bonding can improve resilience and reliability of your internet connection

Device Configuration

Help pages on setting up particular routers for bonding

AAISP have been providing bonded ADSL services for many years... There are various things to consider and understand...

Bonding

Fast failover

It is important that when a line fails for any reason the service switches automatically to using the remaining lines. Our constant quality monitoring system means we are constantly monitoring every line and will be able to react to a failure of a line within 10 seconds. When a line goes out of service the routing of traffic can automatically switch to remaining lines.

When using multiple lines for redundancy this allows the fall-back line to come in to service very quickly. When being used for extra speed the failed line simple means less speed until the problem is resolved.

We provide email and text alerts of lines going off line unexpectedly so that you are alerted to the problem.

IP addressing and routing

Our control pages allow you to adjust the IP routing on your lines. You can have multiple IP addresses on a login, and each can be set for routing to one or more lines. You can set each IP address block separately and can define backup routing.

The recommended set up is to use a FireBrick and multiple PPPoE modems or bridges. The FireBrick would have one WAN address over all of the lines, and either public Legacy IPv4 addresses on the LAN, or private address and NAT on the FireBrick. In either case you can have public IPv6 addresses on the LAN and still handle bonding down and up on multiple lines.

The alternative if to use separate routers. These would normally share a /29 interlink subnet and connect to some firewall or router within you network, routing a static IP block to that router. The interlink address block could be private IPv4 addresses but you do not want NAT or fire-walling on the external routers even in that case as it will not handle the bonding. In general using the FireBrick and PPPoE is simpler and more flexible.

• Also see our IP Routing page.

Tunnelled bonding

Another approach is to use a tunnelling system of some sort such as a VPN or FireBrick tunnels to tunnel traffic via one or more lines to a tunnel endpoint held in a data centre. We offer hosting services and host FireBricks as tunnel endpoints. Using FB2700's at both sides will allow multiple tunnelled connections which can be via multiple ADSL lines that are even from different internet providers.

Examples

Full Bonding with a FireBrick

A FireBrick at your side can manage bonding, fallback and firewalling - this would give you maximum benefit of having multiple lines. AAISP staff can configure a router when purchased for bonding for a nominal fee. The FireBrick pages also covers config examples for bonding on the 2500 and 2700 FireBricks

Mixing BT & TT lines

AAISP BT lines, TalkTalk Wholesale and BE Wholesale lines can all be used for bonding, and gives even great resilience in the case of a fault in BT or a fault in BE. - as of October 2010, BE lines need to run on a reduced MTU of 1492 - and bonding will need all lines to use this reduced MTU. This is an tickbox option on the control pages though

Bonding FTTC Circuits

FTTC lines can be bonded in exactly the same way - although we do sometimes see congestion on the BT network due to the huge amount of bandwidth! We have customers bonding 2 FTTC lines with a FireBrick 2700, giving the full throughput.