Additional Benefits with Fusion Broadband Bonding
Broadband Bonding does not only increase your bandwidth due to the addition of other broadband services, Fusion Broadband also has other benefits that will assist in improving your connection.
Faster Throughput
More speed means your applications and business become more efficient. Bonded connections can very quickly build high speed, highly redundant broadband connections. All while removing your dependence on one single line from one single carrier.
TCP Acceleration
Fusion Broadband’s TCP Acceleration process is designed to maximise bonded throughput on unstable connections.
TCP Acceleration is a performance-enhancer that greatly increases throughput in some circumstances. It is helpful when bonding diverse types of Internet connections such as ADSL with cable or Wireless, or when a connection has high jitter or varying bandwidth. In these situations, the congestion control feature of TCP often reduces the available throughput on the bond to a small fraction of the expected throughput. With TCP Acceleration enabled the effect of TCP’s congestion control is greatly reduced, giving you enhanced throughput.
As a general rule the default setting for TCP Acceleration is applied to ports 80 and 443 (http and https).
Like Compression, TCP Acceleration is not for everyone. The best way to see if it is effective is to try it and monitor the user’s experience.
Bonded Link Compression
Bonding your connection will be an additional boost in speed with our sophisticated data compression process – get up to 400% more throughput on compressible data.
Compression is a feature which, when enabled, will cause all the traffic flowing through the bond (in both directions) to be compressed. Please note that not all traffic is compressible. For example, a JPG image is NOT compressible as it is pre-compressed, however, text based files are very compressible. Different traffic types are compressible by different amounts.
The effect of compression on highly compressible files is quite noticeable. Speed improvements in downloading or uploading highly compressible files can be up to 400%. Compression may not be for everyone though. There is a small penalty in latency when it is on, however the speed improvement often far outweighs this. As an example, two ADSL2+ connections each giving 0.875Mbps uplink when bonded will provide just over 1.6Mpbs uplink. With compression enabled, if you were to send a highly compressible file it would upload in excess of 8Mbps!
Quality Of Service
Don’t let your time and latency critical services (e.g. VoIP) be effected by non-critical services (e.g. Email, dropbox upload, etc.). QoS is all about making sure your time critical applications get priority of the available bandwidth over services where time is not important.
QoS refers to the ability of a network to offer an enhanced level of service to certain types of traffic. For example, Voice-over-IP (VoIP) traffic requires lower latency and jitter than web and email traffic. Fusion Bonding provides sophisticated QoS configurations that can be used to implement almost any type of traffic management strategy.
By enabling QoS on your bonded link, you are telling the bonder and the Fusion Aggregation clusters to manage the data flows through the bond according to the QoS profile.
QoS will be mostly used when you have various applications using the available bandwidth of the bond and also where one application can impact the functionality of another by dominating the available bandwidth. For example, if you had a Remote Desktop session running you would prefer this to have a traffic priority over a download of a software image. In this instance QoS will make sure the Remote Desktop session has sufficient bandwidth to run effectively whilst also allowing the software download to run/co-exist on the link.
Fusion Broadband has a standard default QoS profile which will, in most cases, be very effective. We also have the ability to adjust the profile if your network uses different port numbers, protocols, source networks, destination networks, etc.
Failover / Failback
Failover…do you realise how important it is? With so many applications being pushed up into the ‘cloud’, having a reliable failover connection has never been more critical. Just watch the frustration levels increase around an office when connectivity is lost!
The key thing in having a failover connection is that it needs to be seamless and transparent. Seamless, in that no-one (not even the IT guys) need do anything – it is 100% self-managed – in failing over and failback. Also, what is even more critical, is that the failover event cannot break applications – again it needs to be transparent to users and applications.
On a Bonder, we send a heartbeat ping out to every bonded leg every 100ms. If after 300ms we don’t get a response, we determine that that leg is down. It may not actually be down, it just may not be moving data; either way it’s no good. So once we determine that the leg is down we route all traffic off that leg and onto any other functioning legs. If there are none, or they are down, then we move all the data onto the failover leg (in most cases a 4-3G connection). All this is done inside 300ms! Any packets that were lost are recovered. It’s so fast that you could be on a VoIP call and would not even know you had a major line failure! Another required feature we provide is that the customer’s Public IP does NOT change; this is critical for secure sessions, VPN’s etc. So you could be in the middle of a secure banking transaction, lose your primary lines, failover onto the 4-3G connection and your secure banking session will not fail or show any impact at all! Impressive!
Security
Concerned about security? Well done; you should be! Internet data connections are not as secure as you may think!
In a 2012 security report by TRUSTWAVE, their Global Security report summarised that 62.5% of data theft occurred while the data was in transit!
Fusion Broadband Link Encryption gives you AES 128, 256 or SALSA20 256 encryption between all your bonded sites for peace of mind.
