Bonded Pipes

Thu Jul 24 23:48:32 UTC 1997

On Thu, 24 Jul 1997, J.D. Falk wrote:

> > My question is:  will the ISPs support multiple sessions from the same
> > account (name/password) without charging N X the number of lines per hour?
> 
> 	I can't see how, without drastically changing the authentication
> 	methods used by just about every terminal server out there.

A Transcend sales droid came to visit us and demo their bonding 33.6
modems to us. Their ISP-side solution was pretty inefficent. Each modem
has 2 incoming phone lines, one of which is in a hunt group, one is
standalone. If it's a transcend caller, the ISP's side will send (through
some magical language) the phone number of the second line back to the
user, and the user will establish the second connection. So you
potentially can waste half your lines while you're 100% busy. Uh huh.

As far as compatibility, the modems all have a single serial connection,
so authentication and whatnot isn't a problem. That is, if you don't mind
not knowing when a user is using one channel or 2 :)

> 	This type of technology is best used for dedicated connections,
> 	IMHO, at least until Ascend, Livingston, Cisco, and other
> 	companies that make big dial-in boxes support it.

Might work well for dedicated low-bandwith applications, or in areas where
ISDN is cost-prohibitive or not even available.

They do get a couple points for being in really sexy cases with lots of
lights, and they have great diagnostics (gives all sorts of line quality
reports on the LCD, including db noise, signal loss, etc etc).

Chris

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