LTE Bonding vs Load Balancing

Summary

This articles discusses the differences between bonding and load balancing processes in LTE connections.

If you wish to learn how to configure load balancing on Teltonika-Networks devices, please watch this video.

Bonding

Bonding is the process of aggregating multiple individual connections into a single connection. In other words, bonding can combine the resources of multiple Internet service providers (ISPs) in order to the increase the speed of a single connection.

It works by establishing multiple connections over different ISPs to a VPN server. Data is sent and received over all connections and added up at the server. Thus, bonding can provide much faster data rates for a single connection because it aggregates resources of multiple ISPs.

For example, let's assume that a device behind a router with two SIM cards wants to establish a connection with a host on the Internet. First, two separate connections to a VPN server are established over each SIM card interface. Then data from the end device to the host can be transferred via the server using both connections at the same time.

This makes bonding useful in cases where high speeds are required for a single connection, such as video streaming and large file downloads.

Load balancing

Load balancing is way of distributing traffic over multiple connections. It does not does not bond the connections together, instead