Sharedband offers low-cost route to high-speed access

The basic Sharedband package costs £10 per month per line

A new service aimed at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) promises to deliver broadband access at speeds of up to 80Mbit/s.

The Sharedband software-based managed service is being offered direct to UK businesses as a way of maximising bandwidth at the internet protocol [IP] layer without the need for new network investment.

The service works by using Sharedband software installed on-site onto commodity modems terminating up to four separate connections and aggregating the total up and downstream capacity of all of them into a single high-speed link.

Sharedband marketing consultant David Miller said the software communicates with a hosted aggregation server on a standard PC platform that presents the customer with fixed IP addresses.

“Typically, a customer has two, three or four lines,” Miller said. “If that’s the case, we can monitor traffic and allocate packets to a line, so we can automatically adjust packet weighting to ensure aggregation is always optimised. This also provides resilience – every line has its own router and our aggregation servers are backed up. The bandwidth aggregation also ensures users can share all the bandwidth all of the time.”

Where the highest ADSL2+ speeds are available, Sharedband said its service and bonded lines could increase bandwidth to as much as 80Mbit/s. But it can be used to bond any combination of ADSL, SDSL, VDSL, cable, leased line and mobile connections.

The UK-based provider said the service would best suit homeworkers or growing SMBs, as the aggregation of upload speeds also enables a range of business applications such as video, virtual private networks or voice over IP (VoIP).

Sharedband has been offering the service in the US for the past seven months and through internet service provider (ISP) partners AB Internet, KeConnect, Solutions Inc and Talk Internet, plus their associated resellers.

The service is available from as little as £10 per month per line for the professional package or £20 per month per line for the business package.