Broadband bonding patches together a bigger pipe with a price tag sized for small business.

By Dan O’Shea

Small businesses find it tough to get what they need from big telecom service providers, which more often create offerings with big businesses in mind–”one-size-fits-all” solutions that may or may not fit.

In many cases, that one size is a T-1 line. At 1.5 megabits per second, that’s faster than some business connection alternatives–but it also can cost as much as $1,000 per month. For the most part, service providers are not in a rush to develop a more flexible solution for small businesses that ultimately would subtract from their bottom lines. Fortunately, there’s a work-around: an approach called broadband bonding. Simply put, it allows two or more broadband lines to be bonded into a single, more capacious pipe. Broadband bonding variations are offered by several companies, one of which is Mushroom Networks, founded in 2004 as a spinoff from the University of California, San Diego. Read more!

Sorrento Valley (San Diego) based Mushroom Networks is a start-up company with several solutions for aggregating multiple broadband access lines of any type (DSL, cable, wireless) into a single high-speed shared connection. The challenge Zenzi faced was two-fold.

First, we had to introduce a new and extremely complicated technology to the small business and enterprise communities in a way that could easily be understood and second we had to target the service providers themselves positioning Mushroom’s technology as a potential new type of business class service that may cannibalize existing offerings. After an in-depth brainstorming session, Zenzi suggested coining a general term for Mushroom’s technology that would be easily conceptualized by both the enterprise and service provider targets and in addition emphasize the downside of legacy broadband solutions Mushroom was setting out to replace.

The term Broadband Bonding™ was decided upon and used to launch the initial product called TRUFFLE. For the enterprise side we focused in on Broadband Bonding as a way to significantly boost performance both in the uplink and downlink directions at a mere fraction of the cost of traditional services such as T1 lines. For the service providers, we positioned Broadband Bonding as a new service that would bridge the gap between T1 and T3 subscribers and/or be slowly implemented as networks evolve into an all IP architecture.

The results have been astounding, in just under six months with a very limited marketing push besides PR, Mushroom is consistently moving over $50K of equipment per month and is currently in several trials with tier-1 service providers throughout the country. In addition, the term “Broadband Bonding” as been adopted as an industry-wide term and most recently named by Telephony Magazine as a hot technology to watch and has received several prestigious technology innovation awards.

Mushroom Networks announces their second generation TRUFFLE.

Broadband bonding can help businesses aggregate DSL, cable and wireless links from multiple providers into a single high-speed Internet connection.

Read the full article: http://tinyurl.com/ntjh7t

NewsMover

Recently, at the NAB conference in Las Vegas, I had the wonderful opportunity to walk the halls and see first hand the latest and greatest technologies the broadcasting industry has to offer. Although the show in general seemed a bit on the slow side reinforced by my trusty and very scientific analysis of cab lines (i.e. no cab lines equal slow show) there were some bright spots – one of which was a joint demonstration by Mushroom Networks and HD Wireless called “NewsMover.”

Broadband bonding vendor Mushroom Networks names its first ISP customer

By Ed Gubbins Posted 3/31/09