Posted: 06th Dec, 2007 By: MarkJ
BT has announced the launch of its new '
Sharedband' aggregation suite, which essentially allows consumers to bond together two or more broadband lines to gain a faster speed.
Bonding itself has been around for years but now BT is to allow its wholesale ISP customers the chance to do what third party rivals have been able to for awhile now:
"Using Sharedband means that two 2Mbps lines will perform as one connection of up to 4Mbps, four 2Mbps lines will deliver up to 8Mbps and so on," said Paul Evans, Sharedband's chief executive [EDIT: company shares the same name as its product], on Thursday. "Crucially, the upload speeds will also be transformed. Working with BT will provide us with tremendous market awareness and scalability to meet the expected demand fuelled by new online applications, especially where upstream bandwidth is needed."
The agreement between the two could also allow BT to claim that it is able to offer higher speeds than some of its rivals, although bonding is a typically more expensive approach because you're paying for additional connections.
We suspect that ISP's adopting the technology will initially target it towards business clients, although there could be a consumer market for it depending on price. More @
ZDNet.