ISPPlanet • Stallion ePipe

Boosting Bandwidth through Bonding:
Stallion ePipe

The market for business-grade Internet and Intranet bandwidth is highly competitive. To compete effectively, ISPs must continually seek innovative solutions to make the most of efficient use of a pricey resource.

by Lisa Phifer VP Core Competence, Inc. [January 18, 2001]

But, in our rush to embrace emerging technology and value-added services, we often ignore untapped opportunities already at hand. Business broadband is an excellent example.

DSL is eating into the business Internet access market long dominated by T1/T3, analog, and ISDN connections, but locations easily served by DSL are still the minority. If you cannot (yet) reach a new customer with DSL, should you turn that customer away? Of course not! Grab the account and lock the customer in with a quick, inexpensive solution that leaves you positioned for an upgrade to broadband later.

This is where a product like the Stallion ePipe can help. This inexpensive access router uses patent-pending methods to boost bandwidth through bonding. The ePipe can bundle up to eight v.90 or ISDN calls, providing high-speed site-to-site or Internet access without the hassle of multi-link PPP. The ePipe can also help you overcome loop conditioning and distance issues by bonding slower DSL connections into one fatter pipe.

I2B boosts Internet throughput
Most ISPs are familiar with multi-link PPP (MPPP), the standard-but-flawed method of combining PPP links. To bond efficiently with MPPP, calls must terminate at the same chassis, known as "the multi-link hunt group splitting problem". Windows 98 supports analog MPPP, but significant issues at the POP cause most ISPs to limit MPPP to 2-channel ISDN. Last summer, Netopia started shipping its R-series IDSL and SDSL routers with DSLAM-independent MPPP. Several other manufacturers offer proprietary multi-link alternatives, including Ramp Networks COLT, Shotgun by Diamond Multimedia, and Stallion's Intelligent Internet Bonding.

Stallion's Intelligent Internet Bonding (I2B) balances standard Internet traffic across multiple connections, be they analog, ISDN, or DSL. Today, I2B can bond DSL using PPPoE and DSL modems. According to Tony Merenda, Stallion chief technology office, the planned enhancements will soon allow I2B bonding across multiple T-1 links or DSL routers.

While not the only game in town, Stallion's approach is somewhat unique. I2B allows a variety of interface types to be combined into a virtual interface or connection bundle. And I2B is not limited to load-balancing HTTP. It acts as a transparent proxy server, intercepting outgoing TCP connections and routing them to the least-busy link in the bundle. Finally, I2B requires no channel aggregation at the POP—bonded links can terminate on any chassis, at any POP, at any ISP.

E2B increases secure site-to-site bandwidth
For customers seeking secure, high-bandwidth inter-office pipes, MPPP bonding on the first or last mile is simply not enough. These customers need a solution that provides intelligent splitting and aggregation end-to-end, avoiding inefficient and ineffective fragment recovery at the access concentrator or DSLAM. Stallion's patent-pending End-to-End Bonding (E2B) can do this.

E2B balances traffic secured with IPsec across 2 to 8 analog or ISDN connections, creating site-to-site tunnels with up to 512 Kbps of raw bandwidth. ePipes has multiple Ethernet interfaces for WAN access and will soon have the ability to bond 2 to 4 connections over DSL bridging modems. But sites with T1 and those using DSL routers will have to for a firmware enhancement before using E2B for high-capacity site-to-site tunnels.

According to Merenda, "The PPPoE protocol is used for the connection from an ePipe WAN Ethernet segment, through the DSL bridging modem to the ISP concentrator/DSLAM. E2B operates transparently across several PPP connections, whether they are dial-up or broadband, by using PPPoE to aggregate bandwidth. E2B is independent of the ISP infrastructure: connections can be spread across different ISPs and PoPs and packet fragments travel independently of each other through the Internet."