Hi Ammit,
I was bonding 2 lines with MLPPP up until last month. The obvious advantage for me was the increased speeds (especially upload) as I host my own website and email servers ect...
The main downside is the setup cost. The reason for this is that you either have to purchase Cisco gear which costs lots of money or you have to use linux to bond the lines together into a Wan Pipe. There is also a limited number of modems you can use due to lack of support for linux so if your line does not like either the Sangoma cards or the Speedtouch 330 you are virtually out of luck.
If you want more info on MLPPP check out
http://www.upstreaminter.net/fm. There is loads of info in that forum about it, including peoples troubles and successes with it.
Pros:
- Speed of both lines together
- ISP's are usually small so you are going to get very good support and speeds
Cons:
- Must be supported at the ISP's end
- Expensive to setup
- Can get quite technical
- Very few ISP's support it
Now onto load balancing.
I setup my loadbalancer two weeks ago using a custom version of freebsd called PfSense(
http://www.pfsense.com) after I gave in with my own linux based loadbalancer(it kind of blew up in my face
). It takes about 30 mins to have it all setup 100% and it is very stable. It is easy to configure as it has a web GUI and there is extensive documentation.
Pros:
- Redundancy if you are using with multiple ISP's
- Works with any ISP
- Free to setup
- Speed of both lines(When using multi-threaded site/services)
Cons:
- You only get the speed of both lines when using multi-threaded services.
- ISP's defiantly won't provide support for setting it up ect...
Hope that gives you an idea as to how it all works ect....
My
opinion is that i prefere MLPPP because there is no messing about with DL managers.
James