Bonding mobile broadband

Hello,

Unfortunately I am not able to receive broadband via ADSL due to line length. However in place of that, I use two mobile broadband routers from the Option brand (globesurfer III).

At the moment I have renewed my contract with Three and have two 15GB usage allowance sims, so I have 30GB in total, as this is the only viable way to have access to the internet.

Ideally, if the anything out there exists, I would like a device to bond the two connections from the routers to make one connection.

I have searched around to no avail and I don't think load balancing is what I am looking for, but instead want two bonded Three mobile broadband connections together i.e. to make one 6mbps connection rather than two separate 3mbps, to increase download speed.

Maybe someone knows of a device?

Thanks,
Brian

You would not gain any extra speed by bonding two mobile broadband connection on the same carrier if you could find a cost affective way of doing it. You would need two or more different carriers to gain throughput.

The problem you'd have with bonding two Three 3G connections to the same mast is that you'll be sharing your own bandwidth e.g. achieving nothing.

Even if you did bond two 3G connections from two separate carriers, the improvement might not be what you had hoped for due to the latency inherent to 3G.

Our situation is similar to yours albeit we can get ADSL but it's too slow to bother with and we have Three 3G, have had it for 2 years.

Have looked at other options here but our best bet is presently to either pay for bonded ADSL which costs a fortune and I'd need four or five lines to get decent speeds, or wait untii the local cell is upgraded to 7.2Mbps - Three aim to have them all done by end 2011.

There's also the option of satellite (news, front page of site) but latency is high and usage limits uncertain.

Mark

Thanks for expanding that and explaining it better than I did!

Just a quick question where did you find out that three plan to have upgraded to 7.2Mbps by end of 2011? They used to have a map showing their upgrade plan on the wed site which I though was for 7.2Mbps and I had thought upgrades had been completed as that info had disappeared.

I wouldn't imagine that any UK mobile broadband providers offer a bonded connection, as they would have to support it within their own network. Any device that does true bonding has to send data via two connections that is combined again at the telco.

An alternative to load balancing, if you really need to get a bonded link going, would be to look into bonded VPN connections - have one running via each mobile broadband connection and use a 3rd party company to VPN bond into to combine the bandwidth. This gets around the problem of the mobile companies not offering the service.

Alternatively you could wait a couple of years for LTE to launch which promises speeds of 12Mbps+ bursting higher. Unless you're doing big downloads, the main issue you will be affected by is latency. A modern HSPA device does decently sub-100ms pings whereas even HSDPA ones could be 150-200ms.

jayteedc

In reply to a post by 5km:

Just a quick question where did you find out that three plan to have upgraded to 7.2Mbps by end of 2011? They used to have a map showing their upgrade plan on the wed site which I though was for 7.2Mbps and I had thought upgrades had been completed as that info had disappeared.

I spoke to them on Saturday - I'd been wondering about getting a directional antenna put on the roof, and was querying whether I get almost all of the 3.6Mbps I can (so not worth doing), or only a bit of the 7.2Mbps available (thus making it worthwhile).

The answer was no, but that they would all be upgraded "by the end of 2011".

Mark,
check this website, it could have the solution you are looking for
http://www.mushroomnetworks.com/product.aspx?product...

regards
sp

Alternatively have you looked at doing an outdoor antenna pointed at your local 3G mast, may give you a stronger and faster connection.

take a look here http://www.antennasonline.co.uk/products/67/Router-a...

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