Bonded Internet vs. BGP

What should you choose – Bonded Internet or BGP?

Bonded Internet and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) are two different solutions that you may be considering for your business infrastructure needs. Here is a comparison between Bonded Internet vs. BGP based on important parameters –

Bandwidth & Speed

Bonded Internet uses aggregate bandwidth of all the networks all the time. It can use any network type like xDSL, Fixed Wireless, Metro Ethernet, Mobile Broadband, Fiber etc and even different network providers. Data is compressed and accelerated for transmission. Up to 16 TCP concurrent sessions are possible via multipath TCP between bonder and aggregation platform.

BGP is a fail over solution that uses network A as primary and fails over to network B only if there is an issue/outage with the primary network. It works only with networks of the same ISP provider. No QoS, data acceleration and compression, bandwidth adaptation and private WAN. BGP multi-path extension can be used to insert multiple routes into the routing table. With Cisco routers, the default CEF (Cisco Express Forwarding) behavior is to forward packets on a per-destination basis. This means that if the client uses only a single IP with a large flow, there will be no download performance increase by having multiple connections. Essentially, then, BGP does not increase bandwidth.

Latency & Throughput

Bonded Internet can provide up to a 99.9% SLA service or higher. It can have custom QoS profile for critical data like video conferencing and VOIP. Reduces latency, jitter and packet loss by decreasing packet flow over an individual network suffering from carrier or last mile congestion.

BGP has a SLA up to 99.7% i.e. about 1500 minutes per year and a lag time as data converges to the fail over network- lag time may cause voice calls to drop and monetary transactions to fail.

Reliability

Data flow is uninterrupted if a network fails within a bonded Internet. The system senses a network failure in advance using proprietary algorithms and routes data down the best path without any data loss and customer is not even aware of the failure – a hot standby using mobile broadband services can ensure no data loss on fail over of entire bond – moreover, as the failed network recovers its bandwidth is added back to the bond automatically.

BGP cannot adapt to fluctuating line conditions – only switches to backup when a network fails. Fallback introduces a little lag time in your connection.

Cost

Bonded Internet is cost effective. There is no need of additional load balancers or expensive hardware. Any additional network added to the bond is used to scale up and increase the aggregate bandwidth.

BGP has high capex – Needs multiple boxes. Clients may end up paying full price (plus BGP Service) for a largely unused secondary network (0.3% uptime improvement). It requires the consent of your ISP(s) as well as a network administrator capable of handling the routing tables, autonomous systems (AS), and peering relationships. For this reason, BGP is a poor choice for both minimizing costs and maintaining simplicity in the ever-changing network environment. CEF (Cisco Express Forwarding) can be reconfigured for per-packet load balancing. However, while providing a costly load-balancing solution, the main disadvantage of Cisco per-packet load balancing is a lack of packet out-of-order recovery and handling of connections that have different latency and jitter characteristics. This means that individual sessions are still subjected to the speed of the slowest link available. We have mentioned all of the costly requirements for BGP, but we should also mention that BGP load balancing typically requires an expensive, dedicated direct layer 2 connection between the CPE and service provider router. BGP load balancing can be combined with GRE tunnels that are layered on top of commodity broadband connections, but that has its own limitations that affect MTU size and so forth.

Scalability

With bonded Internet you can add new networks, upgrade branch or head office services without downtime and IP schema changes; you can also create PWAN (Private WAN to interconnect your sites even outside Lebanon). Distributed datacenter architecture can be availed by placing PWAN routers in multiple data centers and creating fail over policies. Third backup aggregation server located in France (with 30 ms latency to Lebanon networks) if all backbones are down. Access to customer portal to view overall network matrix.

BGP is the most complex and most difficult Internet routing protocol to configure and difficult to scale. For some, it is considered the only real option for network redundancy and there are many requirements on the LAN/WAN side to take advantage of the benefits of BGP.

What is our verdict?

It is adequately clear that a bonded Internet has distinct advantages over BGP on a number of important parameters and should be the first choice for majority of the businesses.