From within the Fusion Broadband Client Portal you can see and control the bonds you have with us.
Looking at the menu bar at the top, select “Bonding Admin” and then select “Bonds”
From here you can see the Bond/ Bonds (if you have more than 1)
Indicated here is a summary of the bonds, showing the status of each Leg (service that we are bonding) and the current throughput of the bonded link (you will need to refresh the browser window to get a current view of the speeds.
Selecting the “Details” icon on the far right next to a particular bond, will take you to the details page.
In the top section of this page you will see various details of the Bond: Including the Bonding key and the current traffic through the bond.
You also have four control fields.
1/ QoS
2/ Compression
3/ TCP Acceleration
4/ Restart Bond.
1/ QoS.
QoS – Quality of Service 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 e-mail traffic. Fusion Bonding will support and provide sophisticated QoS configurations and 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. To read more on QoS please click here, or to see details of the “Default Profile” please click here.
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 bond. For example if you had a Remote Desktop session running you would prefer this to have a traffic priority over a download of a SW image. In this instance QoS will make sure the Remote Desktop session had sufficient bandwidth to run effectively while also allowing the SW download to run / co-exist on the link.
Fusion has a standard default QoS profile in which most cases will be very effective, we also have the ability to adjust the profile if your NW uses different port numbers, protocols, source networks, destination networks etc.. If you have a different profile it will be mentioned next to the QoS button. If you would like to change profiles please contact Fusion support.
2/ Compression.
Compression is a feature when enabled will cause all the traffic flowing through the bond – (in both directions) to be compressed. Please note not all traffic is compressible, for example a .jpeg image is NOT compressible as it is pre compressed. Text based files are very compressible. Different traffic types are compressible by different amounts.
The effect on compression on highly compressible files is highly noticeable. Speed improvements in downloading or uploading highly compressible flies can be up to 400%. Compression may not be for everyone, there is a small penalty in latency when it is on, however the speed improvement often far outweighs this.
Selecting compression is as simple as clicking the “On” Button
3/ TCP Acceleration.
The TCP accelerationis a performance-enhancing Acceleration that greatly increases throughput in some circumstances. It is helpful when bonding diverse types of Internet connections, such as ADSL with cable, 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.
TCP Acceleration should not be enabled if the bond provides acceptable performance, due to the following disadvantages:
1. Latency is increased by a small amount. For this reason, we don’t perform TCP Acceleration on ports used by interactive applications (for example, port 3389 for RDP, 22 for SSH, or 3306 for MySQL). By standard TCP Acceleration is applied to ports 80 and 443.
2. The number of simultaneous sessions is limited.
3. Troubleshooting network issues becomes more complicated. For example, without TCP Acceleration, a web browser contacting a non-existent web server will eventually show a timeout error. But with the TCP Acceleration, the web browser instead shows a message about a protocol error or connection reset.
4. TCP urgent data is not supported. The only well-known protocol to use urgent data is Telnet.
Like Compression TCP Acceleration is not for everyone, the best way to see if it is effective for you is to try it and monitor the users experience.
Selecting TCP Acceleration is as simple as clicking the “On” Button
4/ Restart Bond.
Restarting Bonding is similar to restating a router. It is not as brutal as a “reboot” or a power cycle, Sometimes if your Bonded Legs appear up but you cannot pass any traffic through the bond, a restart may help. More often than not these types of symptoms require a router reboot / restart or a modem restart.
When performing a Restart, you will lose internet connectivity while the bonder rebuilds the bond, this is generally less than 60 seconds.
Selecting Restart Bond is as simple as clicking the “Restart Bond” Button
In the Next section "Legs" we show more details of the Legs (services) that we are bonding, together with a little control.
The first Item is Link Mode.
You can change the status on a link from “Active” to “Idle”
When link mode is Active, the service leg will be used in the bond, and traffic will be pushed through the connection. When link mode is Idle, the service will remain “connected” meaning, if it is a pppoe ADSL service it will be authenticated, however the service / leg will NOT pass any traffic through the bond.
Why would change a link to Idle from Active? If you have services that have different data allowances and one may have hit its limit and is throttled or you don’t want excess usage fees from the ISP, you can move this to Idle temporarily.
Or in the case that you know the service is having issues from poor line quality or high levels of congestion from the ISP where the speed and line performance is very poor and impacting the throughput of the bond. You can move it into “Idle” until the issues are resolved. The service will appear as active from the ISP’s perspective so it is active for line and service testing.
The next Field is “Failover”
When a line is operating in Failover mode, it is used only if the main (non failover) services stop working. In most cases a failover connection will be a 3G/ 4G based connection.
To select failover, just click the failover button and the system will toggle between on and off.
** You can only have one failover connection at a time, so if you have one currently selected, you MUST turn this off before selecting a new failover service**