Bandwidth pooling
Bandwidth pooling is used in network switches to optimize the use of network resources. It allows switch processing cards to be shared by physical interface cards. This innovation frees switch resources that would otherwise be stranded when lower-rate interface cards are deployed in an aggregation switch.
Bandwidth Pooling in Dedicated Hosting: This is a key mechanism for hosting buyers to determine which provider is offering the right pricing mechanism of bandwidth pricing. Most Dedicated Hosting providers bundle bandwidth pricing along with the monthly charge for the dedicated server. Let us illustrate this with the help of an example. An average $100 server from any of the common dedicated bandwidth providers would carry 2 TB of bandwidth. Suppose you purchased 10 servers then you would have the ability to consume 2 TB of bandwidth per server. However, let us assume that given your application architecture only 2 of these 10 servers are really web facing while the rest are used for storage, search, database or other internal functions then the provider that allows bandwidth pooling would let you consume overall 20 TB of bandwidth as incoming or outbound or both depending on their policy. The provider that does not offer bandwidth pooling would just let you use 2 TB of bandwidth and the rest of the 18 TB of bandwidth would be practically unusable.
Uses
Bandwidth pooling is used in computer and mobile phone networks.
References
Patent title: Systems, methods and computer products for pooling of wireless collection bandwidth