Broadband bonding fuses five ADSL2+ lines into one for Nowra school

Regional school Nowra Anglican College has implemented broadband bonding technology to increase broadband speeds from 11 Mbps to a maximum of 82 Mbps, and an average upload speed of 0.8 Mbps to a maximum of 22 Mbps.

The school has 750 students and approximately 100 teachers, support and administration staff, all of whom require internet access.

According to Andrew Warfield, ICT Manager and Systems Administrator for Shoalhaven Region Anglican Schools, the need for a good internet connection has increased over the last few years. With the existing system, users experienced dropouts and problems with https sites.

“Nowra Anglican College is about five kilometres from the exchange, which results in greatly reduced speeds, even though we do have ADSL2,” said Warfield. “I’m told that for every 500 metres you are from the exchange you lose 20% of the available speed.

“To try and cope with demand, we had four ADSL2+ services with a load balancing firewall/gateway. Our speeds would vary between 4 Mbps and 11 Mbps downlink and 0.8 Mbps uplink.”

The school installed broadband bonding from Fusion Broadband in January this year. The system employs packet-based load balancing algorithms that provide a sum of the connected services in both directions.

Since installing the new system, and adding just one extra connection, Nowra Anglican College can now attain speeds of 82 Mbps downlink and 22 Mbps uplink when using compressible data, and speeds of 25 Mbps when downloading uncompressed data. This is achieved using five ADSL2+ lines.

“We can actually use the internet without it crashing every day. While we still reach peak usage, far more can be done. There is now a single redundant internet connection, greatly reducing complexity and simplifying service management.à

According to Warfield, the technology will remain relevant even once the NBN is in place.

“Once the NBN hits our front lawn we will still use it for redundancy and aggregation; but until then we will be happy knowing we have the fastest speed we can possibly get in our area.

“Everyone is happy, no one more so than myself. Before this bonding technology there was no other option that was within budget: SHDSL was too expensive and slower; fibre was well out of range; and wireless options were slow and well out of budget as well,” Warfield said.