Bundling DS3's

[jfraasch]

We are getting two point to point 45mb DS3's and are installing PA-2T3+ cards in 7206 routers at each end location. What I want to know is if we can bundle these two DS3's together to get a 90mb single virtual pipe instead of the two discrete 45mb links.

We can do this sort of thing with T1's where we PPP multilink a couple of 1.5MB T1's together to get a 3.0mb pipe. I dont want to take individual channels on the DS3 and multilink them like we do to the T1's because with the 64 channels the overhead would be ridiculous. I doubt it would work at all.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there a technology on the routers that will allow this to happen? Would Virtual Templates do anything for us?

Thanks for the help!

James

[tepatel · Accepted solution]

It will work. You can bundle two T3s togather using ppp multilink.

Link two serial interface under one multilink group. Configure the same way as you configure the T1 lines.

[jfraasch]

Thanks for the reply. I will let you know that I did open a TAC case on it and was told that it was not possible. I think the engineer thought I was talking about PPP Multilinking each of the individual T1 lines.

Thanks again!

[alvincdc]

If both ends of your 2xDS3 connections will be terminated on the same router,

just enable ip cef and configure per packet load-balancing on the interfaces involved.

[jfraasch]

I have a question about CEF forwarding then. If I enable per packet forwarding will I get the full 90MB of bandwidth when I download or will I just get load balancing. I seem to remember somewhere reading that the CEF forwarding does not aggregate the bandwidth, it just load balances.

Let me know what you think.