The Importance of Channel Bonding

Your Internet network is only as good as your modem. And two of the most important measures of a modem are speed and performance, which are dictated by the number of channels it has. Channels are...

Your Internet network is only as good as your modem. And two of the most important measures of a modem are speed and performance, which are dictated by the number of channels it has.

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Channels are like lanes on a highway. The more cars on the road—the more traffic—the more congested the channels. Traffic jams are the buffering and lag that you get when your modem’s not fast enough… when you don’t have enough lanes.

That’s why modems evolved to have more than one lane. And that’s accomplished through a technology called channel bonding. Channel bonding combines multiple channels—or lanes—to increase the amount of traffic that a modem’s highway can comfortably support.

What is Channel Bonding?

Now think about traffic going in and out of a city on a two-lane road. That’s what a 1x1 modem looks like: one channel for each direction. Now imagine a highway that’s 16 lanes wide going into the city, and 4 lanes wide going out. You could get a lot of cars in and out of that city…

And that’s exactly the point of the 16x4 bonded channels in ARRIS’s SURFboard® SB6183—the world’s fastest modem in retail: it can get a lot of data in and out of your home network. It dedicates 16 channels for the sole purpose of downloading data, and keeps 4 open for uploading. What that looks in terms of data rates is 686 Mbps downstream and 131 Mbps upstream.

Right now, you may already have a lot of cars on your road, but when you start tapping into things like multiscreen HD streaming, Ultra HD, and multiplayer gaming—you’ll need more lanes. The SB6183 will handle all the traffic you can throw at it. You might just need your Internet service to catch up first.

Article was originally published on January 4, 2015