Sharedband is making progress bringing its bonded-broadband offering up to speed, billing US customers for the first time in May while it works to sign up more.

Having launched service in the United Kingdom last year, Sharedband announced plans late last year to launch service in Seattle, its first US market. The company uses off-the-shelf routers and its own software to bond broadband lines of various types from various providers, including DSL, cable modem and T-1.

Sharedband originally hoped to launch service in Seattle in January. But after various delays, the company turned up service for its first customer in March: a medical clinic in Everett, Wash., which was served through Isomedia, a Seattle Internet service provider. In May, Sharedband began billing for that service.

The company has also signed up two other partners: Workdesk Solutions -- which operates from Blaine, Wash., and Calgary, Alberta, Canada -- and InnovaCrew Technology Solutions, a provider of managed IT and voice-over-IP PBX service to small businesses in the Sacramento, Calif. area. Formal partnerships with others, such as Net-Venture, a Tacoma, Wash., ISP, are pending, Sharedband said.

InnovaCrew has been beta-testing the Sharedband gear internally since February. The company has bonded two DSL lines (a 3-Mb/s line and a 6-Mb/s line) with a 10-Mb/s cable broadband line from another provider to achieve nearly the combined total of the bandwidth of those three lines.

“When the phase of the moon is just right, we get 18 Mb/s down by 2.5 Mb/s up” on the bonded trio, said Josh Jacoby, InnovaCrew’s founder and president. “I believe the overhead is under 3%, so it’s not much.”

Sharedband claims its overhead -- the packets its technology adds to broadband traffic to manage it -- is 24 bytes or typically about 1.6%.

If one of the three lines is dropped during a live VoIP call, the call isn’t dropped, Jacoby said, but the audio gets “choppy” for a few seconds while the system recognizes the problem and reconfigures itself.

InnovaCrew is just starting to sell VoIP service based on Sharedband and expects a true launch in the third quarter. “I’d been looking for a solution to this for the last year and a half: How can I sell VoIP and differentiate myself from Packet8 or Vonage,” Jacoby said.

Though Sharedband has plans to eventually expand throughout the country, its initial US launch has been limited to the Pacific Northwest since Seattle was where it first deployed the network servers that make up the necessary other end of its system. The closer that end users are to those Seattle servers, the less latency they’ll experience. So far, InnovaCrew has been using Sharedband’s Seattle server bank from a distance of some 750 miles away, but Jacoby’s team is now putting Sharedband servers in its own data center in Sacramento to enjoy a closer source as it rolls out service. Sharedband expects its other partner, Workdesk Solutions, to eventually deploy its servers in Calgary and Vancouver, British Columbia.

“It seems like they could put these all over the place,” Jacoby said. “The aggregation servers don’t have high hardware requirements. They sit in the same racks as our phone equipment.”

Jacoby has also shown the gear to telecom service provider partners who see in it the potential to add DSL lines to existing T-1s. “Their customers are complaining that their [1.5 Mb/s T-1] speeds are too slow, and all they can do is sell them more T-1s,” he said. “They’re running into price resistance. They’re looking at [Sharedband’s gear] and saying, ‘We could sell them a $50 DSL line, get them all this speed, and let them keep their T-1.’”

“When people see how it works, their eyes light up,” Jacoby added. “They start smiling and twitching a little bit.”