Copying the BYOD idea
Unless you’ve been living on Mars you’ll have heard the interest and excitement surrounding Bring your own device (BYOD) recently, where corporate IT is gearing up to support users who bring their own laptops and smartphones/tablets to work and consume business services.
Bring Your Own Bandwidth
Well, what if we could do the same with users home internet connections? Many of us have fast internet connections at home – especially if we’re using the likes of virgin media cable and BT infinity 2 Circuits. Some of these can only be purchased by individuals as they are specifically targeted at the consumer (Virgin Cable being a good example), so if a business wants to support users at home by installing broadband for them the options are more limited.
Having two broadband lines installed with independent routing and switches seems a little inelegant though, surely the best way would be to be able to use all of the available bandwidth across the consumer and business broadband connection .
WAN Link Aggregation
With Peplink routers we can do just that, bond multiple internet connections so that we can use all of the available bandwidth. Speedfusion is the name of the technology they have implemented to enable this, and it creates a VPN tunnel using bandwidth aggregation across all available broadband links in both directions. The biggest benefit for home workers though (apart from an increase in bandwidth back to HQ) is the resilience. If one broadband connection fails or falters, the connection is maintained across the other links.
Traffic Separation
Of course, in most cases we want to be able to segregate the internet traffic so that only business related traffic is sent across the VPN tunnel to HQ, the rest should just go straight out to the web.
With Peplink outbound policies and load balancing algorithms this is easy to configure, and QOS / traffic prioritisation can be used to make sure that if someone else at home hammers the internet connection (your butler maybe, watching the great British bake off streamed live) that it doesn’t negatively affect your work related traffic.
Find out more
Bring Your Own Bandwidth is possible, sensible and available now using Peplink Load balancing, WAN aggregating routers. Get in touch to find out more.