Bonding ADSL and SDSL resupported by BT and Managed Communications
Managed Communications confirm their position as the leading provider of bonding ADSL solutions with the delivery of fully supported, truly bonded, xDSL solutions.
Bonding ADSL, bonding ADSL MAX or bonding SDSL is achieved through hardware technology, usually a box on the customer site, to combine more than one circuit to increase bandwidth and resilience.
Bonding SDSL and bonding ADSL allows you to get more bandwidth than the service provider can offer from the local exchange - so if you can only get 2Mbps and need 8Mbps - then bonding ADSL with 4 x ADSL or bonding 4 x SDSL could be a solution.
By bonding SDSL or bonding ADSL you benefit by combining more than 1 copper pair to form a single circuit. Often this offers a cost effective way to increase bandwidth & resilience. This sounds great for businesses looking to swap leased line and point-to-point services, like kilostream & megastream, for a higher bandwidth, more cost effective solution. It's for this reason that, to date, bonding ADSL & SDSL has proved popular.
Some leading ISPs, such as Zen, don’t offer bonding ADSL services. Recently a number of providers, such as Nildram, who previously offered bonding ADSL services over multilink PPP (MLPPP) technology on Cisco 1800 / 2800 series routers, have exited the market. This is because of a change to the BT core network (Juniper) brought about by 21C – BT's upgrade to an all IP network. Here is BT's official stance:
"The BT Wholesale IPStream Network does not offer a guarantee that Bonded DSL or DSL lines employing Multi-link Point to Point Protocol (MLPPP) can be supported. Whilst it may be technically possible for a Customer (ISP) to deliver Bonded DSL or MLPPP to an End User, as its not a supported product feature we have no way of guaranteeing support for Customers (ISPs) providing Bonded DSL or MLPPP."
Further to this BT have implemented ERX core routers. The new ERX routers use a different architecture and operating system to the existing network equipment, and as such there are issues that are arising which could be impacting a small subset of existing ADSL subscribers with connectivity issues. Neither the new ERX routers, nor the existing network components support the use of Multilink PPP - and this remains unsupported by the network.
Recently therefore the unsupported nature of multilink PPP has been bad news for businesses exploiting bonding ADSL technology. There have been attempts to rebrand loadbalanced SDSL/ADSL, but without the increased throughput seen when truly bonding ADSL, this has fallen foul.
This isn’t the end of the bonding ADSL story though – Managed Communications,
Nathan Hill-Haimes, MD of Managed Communications said, “bonding ADSL & SDSL is a great alternative to long lead-times and expensive prices charged for leased line services…some of our customers have over 60Mbps of connectivity at less than half the traditional cost. Our technology is supported by BT and we look forward to providing more customers with a great service offering by bonding ADSL, ADSL MAX and SDSL…”.
Managed Communications are a specialist virtual network operator focused on providing data networks via bonding ADSL & bonding SDSL to distributed high end SMEs and Corporates – they can be reached at www.managedcomms.co.uk or 0870 803 4645.
