Would bonding the 3 lines actually give a cumulative speed when doing a speed test?

Would each download not just pick the line with the most available bandwidth at that moment in time therefore the download speed would just be as fast as the one single line?

Depends on the bonding method, whether it's per-packet load balancing with 3 separate WAN IP addresses, or true bonding with 1 WAN IP address.

I have load balancing technology with 3 WAN IP's, I'd be very grateful if you could explain true bonding with 1 WAN IP

In reply to a post by helix_quazer:

I have load balancing technology with 3 WAN IP's, I'd be very grateful if you could explain true bonding with 1 WAN IP

It needs ISP support, but its properly known as an "aggregate connection" where the IP traffic is split down all the connections and reassembled at your end.

Servers in data centres use similar techniques, you can have 4 ethernet cards on a server all running at 1Gigabit/sec and connected to the same switch. You then aggregate them together so that you have a logical channel running at 4 gigabit/sec.

I believe Cisco call it EtherChannel, Juniper call it Aggregate Ethernet (ae0).

I was thinking of asking if it really was bonding, or load balancing.

You might find this AAISP page helpful. Note re load balancing:-

The only downside of this method is that sometimes packets can arrive in a slight different order to which they were sent. This is normal and part of the IP protocol. However, not all systems handle out of order packets as well as they could so the more lines you have the less effective the bonding is.

On the bonding itself has the original poster checked the provider supports multilink ppp

Yes my ISP does support mlppp, thanks for the link I will have a read

Yeah sounds like its just load balanced, so you are not tripling the speed but you are giving each computer on your network an option of 3 different broadband lines when it choses to download data.

It is effectively tripling the bandwidth but will require a multi-threaded download to utilise it. Anyway, we still have to discover if the 3 streams will run at full speed independently but simultaneously.

yep time to get out the 3 pc's