Bonding or diversity. Which one should you choose?

One of the features that makes Quantum Lite stand out from other products is the ability to use more than one IP link for its transmissions. More specifically, Quantum Lite can combine fixed Ethernet, wireless Wi-Fi and both LTE modems to increase the reliability of contributions. There are two working modes when combining the four IP interfaces:

The first is the Bonding mode. In this mode the data traffic is spread over all available interfaces, thus increasing the available transmission bandwidth, which could be used to transmit higher quality audio at higher bit rates. In this mode, each audio data packet is assigned to the IP interface with the highest transmission capacity at that particular time. To compensate for possible packet losses, the BRAVE protocol includes an active recovery system whereby the receiving equipment can request the retransmission of packets that have not arrived when they should.

The second is the Diversity mode. Now the traffic is not distributed but doubled, tripled or quadrupled and each replicated stream is transmitted simultaneously on each of the interfaces. This drastically reduces the probability of losing audio packets in the transmission, so we will be ensuring a very stable audio communication.

In practice, we recommend using Diversity mode by default, especially if you are only working with the 2 LTE modems, as this mode has proven to be the most robust under the worst transmission conditions.

If you are already a Quantum Lite user, what experience have you had with these two modes of operation?