What is a Bonded Solution?

A Bonded Solution is when you have two 1.5 Mbps T1 lines (from the same provider) which have been joined together in a special way so that you can use the combined total of 3.0 Mbps of Internet data or the 46 channels for voice/phone use. You cannot bond T1's together if they are not through the same provider.

The best technology these days is through MLPPP (Multi-link point to point protocol). Multilink is a bandwidth-on-demand protocol that can connect multiple links between two systems as needed to provide bandwidth on demand.

If you were to have two T1's, unbonded, then you could not use the full 3.0 Mbps of bandwidth all at once. For example, if you did a speed test, you wouldn't be able to get a result of "3.0 Mbps", the max you could download/upload at any one time would be 1.5 Mbps, even though you had two T1's. That's why it's important you get the T1's from the same provider and that they use MLPPP to bond the T1's together to create a bonded solution. You can bond quite a few T1 together, up to 8 of them together to make 12 mbps (equivalent to fractional DS3).

However, if you go beyond 4 bonded T1's within a bonded solution then it makes more sense to start looking at a fractional/burstable DS3 because sometimes the DS3 loop pricing is similar so the DS3 service would allow you to scale much easier, up to a full T3 line.