The Kenton Group Touts 320Mbps Bonded FTTC Broadband

The Kenton Group, which supplies specialist network access services to ISPs and others, has today announced the launch of its new Velocity Lite “ultrafast” broadband solution that offers speeds of up to 320Mbps over bonded FTTC lines.

Apparently Velocity Lite bonds four ‘up to’ 80Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) lines together using Multi Link PPP (MLPPP) and this is said to provide for a “cost effective and resilient alternative to [true fibre optic connectivity] when delivering ultrafast data access to customers“.

The service is also said to have passed BT’s conformance testing for connection to their national FTTC network.

Lee Palmer, Commercial Director at The Kenton Group, said:

“We are committed to delivering innovative products that offer reliability and a low total cost of ownership to our customers. With the Velocity Lite, we can provide customers ultrafast data access of speeds up to 320Mb, enabling them to harness the benefits of the cloud and to prioritise critical data and services with true Quality of Service.

Many businesses now need to enhance the speed and resilience of their data services because of their dependency on critical cloud based services. The Velocity Lite can help them deliver this.”

On the surface this may seem like a good solution, but bonding multiple lines together is nothing new in this industry and the approach does have a number of pitfalls.

Firstly, bonding produces diminishing returns with each new line and if, for example, you only get 10-20Mbps on a single FTTC line then naturally Velocity Lite will still deliver massively less than the 320Mbps headline figure promoted.

The other issue is one of cost, since bonding four lines means multiplying four lots of phone line and broadband rentals, which isn’t exactly cheap and pushes near to the starting price of some leased line options. Another issue is that not all buildings will have enough spare copper pairs to run the full service.