British startup begins U.S. invasion in Qwest territory

Sharedband expects to launch its bonded broadband offering in the United States this week, starting in Seattle and planning to expand throughout the country this year.

The start-up, which aims to boost broadband speeds by bonding ADSL lines (both to other ADSL lines and to cable broadband), says it will launch with three Seattle Internet service providers later this week. And in late February, it plans to begin recruiting from a pool of more than 500 ISPs serving Qwest Communications.

Sharedband’s initial offering uses a bank of managed centralized servers, off-the-shelf routers from Netgear and its own firmware to bond up to four ADSL lines for greater bandwidth speeds. When deployed with a Linksys WRT54 wireless router, Sharedband’s system can bond broadband lines from multiple providers, whether ADSL-based or not, allowing customers to couple service from telco and cable providers, for example.

End users will be able to download the router firmware themselves over the Internet if they want. But the system won’t work unless the user is in some proximity to Sharedband’s servers. The precise reach of the system isn’t known (and distance adds latency to the service), but the company expects its Seattle infrastructure to serve much of the Pacific Northwest.

The company began turning up customers in England in December, working with British Telecom.