Broadband Bonding and Wan Optimization
Here at Mushroom Networks, we are often asked what the difference is between Broadband Bonding and WAN Optimization. The end result is the same: faster file transfer rates. But the core concept behind the two technologies is very different.
Broadband Bonding makes the pipe larger, and WAN Opt makes the files smaller.
With Broadband Bonding, we combine multiple channels into a single, larger pipe. Plug in a few DSL lines and you have the aggregated speed of each one.
Effectively we are taking many smaller pipes and fusing them together into one large pipe that acts as if it is a single unit. This is not load balancing. There is a very smart algorithm (that our very own team created) that can send the packets out in such a way that even if you lose a link, you won’t lose a chunk of the data.
WAN Optimization, on the other hand, is the term applied to a family of methods used to decrease the amount of data that is going through the pipe. At the most elementary level, this is achieved by either caching or compression.
Caching temporarily stores the files you use most often, and then updates only the parts of the file that have been changed. This reduces the amount of traffic to only the percentage of the file that has any new updates, and is a great solution for enterprise offices in which the same files are used over an over again
Compression decreases the size of your file by compressing the data into a more efficient package. Data is encoded using various encoding techniques that utilize fewer bits than the originial file.
In the end, although we do a similar task as WAN Optimization the fact that we do it in a very different way is a key point. It means that the two technologies are not mutually exclusive. Even better, they are very complimentary.
Puja Abid, VP of Marketing, Mushroom Networks, Inc.
Mushroom Networks is the provider of SD-WAN (Software Defined WAN) and NFV solutions capable of Broadband Bonding that enables self-healing WAN networks that route around network problems such as latency, jitter and packet loss.