Bandwidth aggregation products, such as affordable WAN link controllers, can enable you to purchase multiple low-cost network connections such as DSL, cable, fiber, wireless, etc., and combine them to give you the total bandwidth you require. You can easily and flexibly add bandwidth as your organization’s Internet usage increases.

As your organization grows, so does the number of employees, partners and customers that use your network. You may find yourself needing more bandwidth to connect your organization to the Internet, or new leased line connections for your remote offices. However, your Internet bandwidth requirements may not have grown quite enough to move up to the next level of connectivity, such as replacing a T1 with a T3 or bonded-T1. There is a cost-effective alternative using affordable WAN link controllers that aggregate bandwidth - automatically load balancing traffic among multiple Internet connections and providing failover.

Today, most organizations in urban and suburban areas use broadband and/or more reliable dedicated leased lines for Internet connectivity. Over the last several years T1 connections have come down significantly in price, but still cost an average of $400 per month. In more remote areas, a T1 connection can still cost upwards of $2000 per month. This is a cost that many small-to-medium size enterprises (SME) can’t afford. Their alternative is to use broadband connections such as cable, DSL, fiber and wireless.

Broadband providers often offer business packages with service level agreements guaranteeing bandwidth speed and uptime - at lower prices than a T1 connection. For example, a business-class fiber connection to the Internet might deliver 15/2Mbps for $60.00 per month. Cable business Internet packages can range from $60.00 per month for 4Mbps/384Kbps to $160.00 per month for 8/1Mbps.

With a business-class cable connection an SME can save $360.00 per month compared to a T1 connection. By aggregating bandwidth, from multiple broadband connections you also get more bandwidth, 15Mbps downstream and 2Mbps upstream, compared to 1.5 Mbps up and down for a T1 connection. You also gain the additional benefit of redundancy in the event that one of the ISPs has an outage.

By applying channel bonding, using a WAN link controller between two sites, you can take network connections from different ISPs (without their having to participate), and combine the two connections into one virtual connection to affordably gain more bandwidth. For example, you can combine a business-class fiber connection (15/2Mbps), and a business-class cable connection (8Mbps/1Mbps) to receive a total bandwidth of 23Mbps/3Mbps. Again, compared to a T1 at $400.00 per month with 1.5Mbps up/downstream, the channel bonded fiber and cable connections with a combined cost of $220.00 per month with 23Mbps/3Mbps delivers a fast return on investment. Not to mention the built-in reliability that you can’t get from a single ISP.

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