>We did a proprietary multilink before MP was available also. However, not
>all customers expect multilink out of ISDN only. There are a large number
>of customers who would like to line balance across say multiple T1's,
>because they need more bandwidth than a single T1, but can't afford a T3.
Wonderful, but MP is not the way to do it for T-1's. You need a good
hardware solution like a Larscom IMUX unit. Otherwise you have to worry
about buffering etc. Not only do you lose in overhead by adding the
multilink support, but you lose about 10% by using PPP vs. HDLC. Of
course I am talking about hardware that is neither Bay nor Livingston.
The IRX line doesn't do anything but PPP, and couldn't handle 6 Mbps on
one of its serial ports anyway. BTW, we do this on our lines, not only is
it cheaper than a T-3, but it is more reliable, because we use different
providers for the T-1's riding different T-3 carriers. So loss of a
single carrier T-3 won't take us down.
>When we released MP on our routers, we did so across both dial services
>(ISDN and traditional switched) as well as PPP based synchronous circuits.
Livingston already explained why they didn't do this. Their old PM-2
technology (386 based) did not have the hardware buffering to do it right.
I respect that. Just because it is do-able in software, doesn't mean that
it SHOULD be done. Look at the foolish people that buy modems that
offload the processing that the modem should be doing instead of the CPU.
Yeah, it was cheaper, and it was do-able, but its not "The Right Thing".
They have said they can probably add MLPPP to the PM-3 analog ports,
but not the PM-2's
>Since you can't always control what router is on the other end, open
>systems generally provide the better solutions.
Agreed, but realize that when Livingston came up with this, there WERE
no viable open solutions. Everyone was doing proprietary.