Has anyone used the sharedband connection bonding product?

Question

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

Answer 1

We gave it a shot, but the performance was worse than what we had without the service. After a complex setup process, numerous support calls and a promise the founder would look into the latency and bandwidth issues, we gave up and sent everything back.

Answer 2

I guess that's no-one then! We may get a test account. If so I'll post my experiences of it here.

JR

Answer 3

I use it to bond two dsl lines together.

It works very well, allows full speed movie streaming.

Answer 4

We tried Sharedband with two ADSL lines (one from IDNet and one from Zen).

What we liked:

• Good support
• Upload speed nearly always doubled (e.g. approx 1.3 mbps from 0.65 mbps for each line)

Here's what we didn't like:

• Poor download performance for sites from higher latency, e.g. when accessing US located site from UK. The throughput with Sharedband was often less than a quarter of what we would get with a single ADSL connection
• Added latency and jitter. We'd often get a B grade rating from pingtest.net compared with a rating on individual lines. This resulted in erratic download speeds rather than the steady speed seen on raw ADSL lines.
• Generally variable results. Sometimes we'd get 2x ADSL download speed for a site or service, then for no apparent reason this would drop for a while to 0.5 x ADSL download speed

In the end we got a refund and just used the WAN load balancing on our Draytek 2830 router.

BTW, we also tried Bonded ADSL from Managed Communications. It seemed good for a few weeks but they then started to add traffic shaping and port blocking. This caused problems with email access over POP3 SSL and very slow downloads in Windows Update.