When designing your LAN or WAN, the logical solution for your business is to figure out your expected bandwidth usage. If your company has more than 50 employees or it uses a lot of bandwidth for various applications such as VOIP, videoconferencing, CRM, this may often indicate that you may need to get multiple T1 lines, which is often referred to as bonded T1's.


A bonded T1 just means that the you have two 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.


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 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.

It's best that you use the services of a company such as www.shopforbandwidth.com to walk you through all of your choices for network design utilizing a bonded T1. If you need more than what a bonded T1 can provide, such as a fractional or full DS3, they can assist you in figuring out what the best solution is going to be for your business. They will do this at no cost to you since they are paid by the providers to refer business to them.

Many small to midsize businesses have used the service Shopforbandwidth.com offers. They offer bandwidth pricing on T1 lines, T3 lines or DS3 lines, OC3 service, MPLS or Frame relay, as well as other internet connections.


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