Bonding Still Relevant Today

Cromwell Business Systems are a specialist retail software and IT services business.
For more than 20 years, Cromwell Business Systems have developed a deep understanding of the business challenges facing consumer electronics retailers. In response to their customers’ needs, they have developed robust, reliable, scalable solutions for both large and small retailers.

Over the last year, due to the pandemic, there has been a push towards home working and Cromwell Business Systems have been helping their staff and customers achieve this with high bandwidth options such as FTTP from Watchfront.

FTTP is not available in all areas, and in some circumstances BT are willing to deploy this “On Demand” but only with high installation costs. In one example of this there was a hefty installation charge from BT and their “FTTP on Demand” service option was not viable.

Watchfront were then able to provide a solution which historically they have been providing to customer in rural low bandwidth areas for many years. This solution is known as bonding and is achieved by using FireBrick routers to combine one or more line together to get a greater bandwidth than one line on its own.

The solution provided is a pair of bonded FTTC lines which when combined can give a download speed of around 130Mb/s and an upload speed of above 30Mb/s. This could be expanded to incorporate more lines and increase the speeds further if required.

The above solution was deemed to be the most cost effective available which consummated the speed requirements with out paying excessively high installation fees for a “FTTP on Demand” service.

Bonding is still relevant today and available at Watchfront!