Small ISP owner? sales-person? Skip to the bottom and download a free sales sheet you can take to your next customer telling them how they can bond multiple Internet connections for faster speeds. And why they should consider doing so.

“I feel the need.. the need for speed!”

Editor’s note: Yes, I appreciate that speed and bandwidth are not the same, but for the sake of getting your eyes on this post, I chose Tom Cruise and not a picture of plumbing.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise that network bandwidth requirements are soaring. Largely unchecked, applications are improving user experiences by increasing the amount of data required for their use. As those applications get better (more plug-ins, clearer video, sadly more tracking technologies..), and as more users elect to use them, the strain on a business’s network can get out of hand.

Even Slack, the hyper-popular messaging application – it needs 600kbps for a 2-person conference call (in upload and download).. and a whopping 4Mbps for a 4-person call.

So sure, you might have 600kbps of upload bandwidth to spare for slack, but if you consider all of the other applications that may be running simultaneously, your “available” bandwidth may start to dwindle. How much bandwidth does each user’s email-related activities need? What about their phones? web-browsing? file-sharing?

One Ring Networks, an ISP in Georgia posted a pretty good bandwidth calculator here. In it, they list a bunch of common applications and help you identify how much bandwidth you’d need per user for each simultaneous session. It adds up pretty quickly. Here’s what we need in our office (at peak!):

1. Slack for our daily stand-up: 1.2Mbps down, 600kbps up.
2. Web Browsing (6 users): 6Mbps down/up
3. Email (6 users) 6Mbps down/up
4. Music Streaming: 0.3Mbps down

Total: 13.5Mbps download (minimum) and 12.6Mbps upload. 13.5Mbps download isn’t necessarily tough to find, but what about getting the 12.6Mbps upload?

Bonding Internet Connections:

Fiber providers will tell you to wait for Fiber to be available. Cable providers can turn your bandwidth up fairly easily. For those users that are cost-conscious, or haven’t got access to high-speed cable or other, we suggest bonding.

What is bonding?

Bonding is a technology that combines the bandwidth of multiple Internet connections. It’s not new, but we thought we’d try

In the image below, the top graph shows two Internet connections that are live at a given site. In this case, each connection is capable of doing about 10Mbps. The green line is the actual bandwidth of that connection during a speed test.