According to one embodiment, a physical line receiver is coupled to at least one of a plurality of bonded communication lines over which a sequence of packet fragments are transmitted as data units. The physical line receiver includes at least one physical sublayer that transfers packet fragments recovered from different ones of the data units received by the physical line receiver to a bonding sublayer for packet reassembly until the physical line receiver is instructed to stop transferring packet fragments because of a transmission error on one or more of the bonded communication lines coupled to a different physical line receiver. The at least one physical sublayer also buffers the recovered packet fragments without transferring the buffered packet fragments to the bonding sublayer until the physical line receiver is instructed to resume transferring packet fragments to the bonding sublayer.