My business is served by a business cable connection. Business DSL pricing has gotten much more aggressive in my area but rather than simply switch ISPs I'm considering a couple different options:
Load Balancing I'm considering keeping my cable connection, adding a DSL connection, and load balancing between the two. This has the advantage of higher reliability due to redundancy thru two different providers.
Binding/Channel Bonding I'm also considering binding two or more DSL connections together, since my DSL provider does not offer an upstream throughput option that I'm completely satisfied with. If it's technically possible (and if my LEC supports it) I could bind 2 or 3 DSL connections together and the cost would be lower than or comparable to what I'm paying now for cable, with potentially much better specs on the connection.
I don't know whether channel bonding multiple DSL connections is a reaslistic scenario; I'm waiting to hear back from the phone company on this. I would also consider load balancing a channel bonded DSL link AND our cable connection to get the benefit of failover if an ISP goes down or has trouble.
I could set up one of my Windows Server 2003 servers as a router to provide the load balancing; my SonicWall appliance is currently serving as my router. Alternatively I could upgrade to a firewall appliance that supports load-balancing multiple WAN connections.
All thoughts/comments appreciated; it's very possible that I'm crazy.
Thanks in advance,
Bryan