Broadband Bonding extends to cellular wireless access

by Steve Ragan - Mar 25 2008, 08:00

New CPE offered by Mushroom Networks, expands broadband bonding to include cellular wireless access. Last month, Mushroom launched the Truffle BBNA (Broadband Bonding Networking Appliance). Today they are adding to the Truffle the ability to support cellular wireless broadband access.

Broadband Bonding is a method of taking multiple DSL, Cable or T1 services and combining them to gain faster download speeds and solid uptime. The technology is an asset to small businesses, or resource tapped data pipes. The Truffle provides this high speed bonded link access to the Internet by optimizing the use of available connection resources. It does all of this without the network admin pestering the ISP, or mucking up network configurations. It includes an internal router and firewall capability that can be enabled by the user as needed. Other Internet services such as port forwarding, static IP, dynamic IP, PPPoE, DHCP, DMZ, UPnP, and Dynamic DNS are all supported.

Until today, that was all the Truffle did. While impressive, offering speeds of 65Mbps when bonded, there was a missing aspect. What happens of all if the lines failed? While one line can fail in the bonding, with no noticeable speed loss, if all of the bonded lines fail, you’re up the creek without a paddle. By adding cellular wireless broadband connectivity access, the Truffle can still act as the king of failover plans even in the event primary wired (T1, DSL, cable, and satellite) broadband connections are lost. 

Adding a PCMCIA port to the standard Truffle device, cellular data cards supporting EV-DO, HSPA, EDGE or GPRS are configured as an independent WAN connection supporting either always-on or fail-over-only functionalities. In the always-on mode, the wireless data card is broadband bonded with other high-speed services managed by the TRUFFLE device. In the case of fail-over-only mode, Truffle will automatically switch to wireless data card services when all other wired broadband connections have failed.

“Broadband access is arguably the single most critical service supporting today’s enterprise,” said Cahit Akin, CEO of Mushroom Networks. “By incorporating wireless broadband bonding, TRUFFLE solves a key area of concern by ensuring reliable high-speed access to the Internet even during circumstances where primary connections are interrupted. In addition, unlimited wireless data plans which largely go unused can now readily contribute to overall network speeds.”

The Truffle with cellular wireless access capability is $3,195. If you have the original Truffle, Mushroom says to contact them to upgrade, but did not mention anything more than that.

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