Netgear this week unveiled new firmware for its broadband customer premises gear that allows carriers to bond multiple broadband lines including cable and DSL.

The equipment vendor’s DG834N ADSL2+ gateway is a customer-located DSL router that includes four Fast-Ethernet ports on the LAN side as well as 802.11n. It has already been used in recent months by Sharedband, a UK-based provider of broadband bonding systems that announced a nationwide US expansion this week. But Netgear is now making the technology available to other service providers. And another UK provider, TalkTalk, is already using it to bond DSL pairs.

Netgear’s gateways work in collaboration with Sharedband software modules based on servers in the network, which were deployed in Seattle early last year but are now in San Jose, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, New York and Miami. Those modules manage the behavior of the routers at the customer premises -- anointing one router the master and the other its slaves -- bonding broadband traffic at the IP level, not the physical or data-link level like some bonding systems.

The technology employs the virtual router redundancy protocol (VRRP), which creates redundant paths among routers for use in case primary paths are disrupted. So in addition to boosting bandwidth, it also adds redundancy in case one of the bonded lines goes down.