Bonding
A T1 bonded line is Internet service for an apartment complex, subdivision or wireless ISP. You might start out with a single T1 line as an Internet service backbone until there are enough subscribers to require, and pay for, additional bandwidth. Then you can bond in a second T1 for growth.
Another good use for bonded T1 lines is transmission of very high quality audio or video signals that exceed the 1.5 Mbps bandwidth of a single T1 line but don't justify ordering T3 service. The single T1 line that might have been adequate for Internet browsing and email may not be able to handle the increased traffic created by the IP phone calls. Fortunately, it's easy to bond in more bandwidth to create a network with adequate bandwidth.
The beauty of bonding T1 lines is that you don't have to pay for more bandwidth than you need at a particular time. If business expands, add another T1 line or two. Keep in mind that rural or even some subdivisions in metro areas are not wired for fiber optic service and it may be unlikely that anyone is going to bear that expense anytime soon. Because T1 was designed to be provisioned on two copper pairs of regular telephone wire, it's available in smaller towns; out in the country and just about any place you'd want to put a business.
Most businesses already have multi-pair phone cable provisioned. Use some of these to bring in bonded T1 service up to 12 Mbps. In some remote locations, you may even be able to justify additional T1 bonded bandwidth.
Another available service is a T3 line at 45 Mbps. That's the equivalent of 28 T1 lines. There are a couple of ways to combine the capacities of T1 lines to effectively make a bigger digital line. Some routers offer a feature called load sharing or load balancing. They act like traffic cops to keep two or more T1 lines equally loaded with packets. Another way is known as multiplexing.
In multiplexing, the bit streams from a number of different sources are combined into one transmission line. Bonding sounds a bit like gluing a bunch of T1 lines together, which effectively it is. It is also helpful to know that bonding is an acronym for an industry standards group.
