Has anyone used the sharedband connection bonding product?
- by John Rennie
See http://www.sharedband.com/ for details on the product.
Obviously Sharedband aren't too keen on giving away their technical secrets, but I would guess that it bonds the connections at the IP layer i.e. their routers send the IP packets to the SharedBand routers over all available lines and the ShareBand routers handle all the virtual circuitry and provide the NATing to whatever IP address(es) they've assigned you. It looks a clever idea, and a good way to provide some resilience over ADSL links. You can even use ADSL links from different ISPs and SharedBand will still bond them for you.
But, I find myself wondering how well it really works, and whether it's worth it. The Draytek routers can already load balance (though not bond) up to four ADSL lines, so the SharedBand product really only offers an advantage if you're hosting servers i.e. you can have one IP address to accept incoming connections through all your (working) ADSL lines. But should you really try and host servers using ADSL lines, especially since ADSL upload performance isn't stellar? Wouldn't it be better to use a hosted server, or maybe pay up for a leased line with a SLA?
So I'm asking if anyone is using SharedBand, and if so what do you think of it?
JR
