What is the Difference Between a Link Load Balancer and a Broadband Bonding (Link Bonding) Router?
The main distinction between any of the load balancing devices and a broadband bonding (or link bonding) router is that the broadband bonding provides link bonding for data transfers. With link bonding, the access links are effectively combined together into a single virtual pipe so that the data transfer rate of the virtual pipe is the sum of the data transfer rates of the access links that are being combined.
Load balancing devices simply distribute load at session-level granularity. For example, if a user within the local network downloads a file, it generates a server request that is sent out over a single Internet access line. As a result, the file download will only use a single Internet access line, even though the other available Internet access lines may be idle. This is primarily how the load balancers and load balancing routers operate.
So in summary, with broadband bonding you get the full combined speed of all of the links, while with link load balancers you only get the speed of one link.
Here is some more information regarding Broadband Bonding Technology.
Cahit Akin, CEO, Mushroom Networks, Inc.
Mushroom Networks is the provider of SD-WAN (Software Defined WAN) and NFV solutions capable of Broadband Bonding that enables self-healing WAN networks that route around network problems such as latency, jitter and packet loss.