At some sites it is not possible to have one large internet connection so instead several connections may be aggregated. There are two main approaches to aggregation – load balancing and bonding. Load balancing, as the name suggests, is an approach where traffic is split over the different connections using a set of rules – the key aspect of load balancing is that an individual user can never get a faster speed than the maximum speed of one of the individual connections. Bonding operates by combining all the connections into one virtual connection which means an individual user can experience a maximum speed which is the roughly the sum of the individual connections. However, there are downsides to bonding, for example there is an overhead to the bonding process which reduces the overall speed and typically the bonding process has to work based on the performance of the slowest connection which often means a bonded connection is quite inefficient.