Mushroom Networks releases Broadband Bonding technology

by Steve Ragan - Feb 13 2008, 08:00

Mushroom Networks, based out of San Diego, CA, is best known for single-ended broadband bonding technology. Yesterday, they unveiled their Truffle (BBNA6401) broadband bonding network appliance. 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 new CPE from Mushroom (cool name) offers speeds of up to 65Mbps a second.

The Truffle is geared towards small to medium sized businesses. Large enterprises and even multi-tenant buildings can benefit from bonding technology depending on the network design. Ask any IT contractor or IT worker if they have ever had to suffer on a large network running off a T1 or a DSL line. The answer is yes. Business owners want it all, but do not want to pay for it. This means getting a Business DSL line, Business Class Cable, or single T1 and expecting IT to make it work. On a network with maybe 10-20 people, this is okay. Take that network up to 200 and you have to expand the bandwidth or you will see the network crawl. Even with 10-20 people on a network the speeds are slow.

“Our patent pending bonding technology allows local networks to mix and match various broadband access methods for higher throughput capacity and redundancy while scaling resources based on immediate needs,” said Dr. Cahit Akin, co-founder and CEO of Mushroom Networks. “LEC’s and Internet service providers can also capitalize by cost effectively bundling the reliability of T1 and speeds of DSL or cable together in a single service.”

The Truffle provides this high speed bonded link access to the Internet by optimizing the use of available connection resources without requiring coordination with the ISPs or any changes to the local network. This is good, because often it is easier to sell, say two or more connections at a lower cost to the boss, than trying to get approval for network expansion. 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.

Dissimilar types of broadband access can be combined in any manner resulting in greater connection speeds even for an individual file download and higher reliability due to the redundancy of the connected links. If one or more of the bonded links fails or is degraded, the Truffle transparently spreads the traffic across the remaining links in real-time without any interruptions. Connections can be scaled as needed without requiring the network to be taken off-line.

In short, you now have a good reason to get out of the single DSL office and with a price of just under $3000 the Truffle is a good bit of hardware to have around.

Around the Web