Mushroom Networks upgrades broadband bonding gear

Broadband bonding can help businesses aggregate DSL, cable and wireless links from multiple providers into a single high-speed Internet connection. In the latest version of its gear, unveiled this week, Mushroom Networks has added features geared for enterprises, including higher throughput, failover and QoS capabilities.

The upgraded Truffle device bonds as many as five high-speed Internet connections (DSL, cable, T-1, DS3, wireless). If one of the links in the bonded pipe fails or is degraded, the traffic is spread across the remaining links.

Throughput now maxes out at 300Mbps -- up from 65Mbps in the previous generation of Truffle gear, says Cahit Akin, co-founder and CEO of Mushroom Networks.

Customers can opt to deploy a single Truffle device to combine dissimilar broadband access technologies and form a single, virtual pipe. Or, customers can deploy Truffle devices on both ends of a WAN link, such as at headquarters and in a branch office, to optimize both download and upload capacity.

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Broadband bonding can help businesses aggregate DSL, cable and wireless links from multiple providers into a single high-speed Internet connection. In the latest version of its gear, unveiled this week, Mushroom Networks has added features geared for enterprises, including higher throughput, failover and QoS capabilities.

The upgraded Truffle device bonds as many as five high-speed Internet connections (DSL, cable, T-1, DS3, wireless). If one of the links in the bonded pipe fails or is degraded, the traffic is spread across the remaining links.

Throughput now maxes out at 300Mbps -- up from 65Mbps in the previous generation of Truffle gear, says Cahit Akin, co-founder and CEO of Mushroom Networks.

Customers can opt to deploy a single Truffle device to combine dissimilar broadband access technologies and form a single, virtual pipe. Or, customers can deploy Truffle devices on both ends of a WAN link, such as at headquarters and in a branch office, to optimize both download and upload capacity.

Newly added failover capabilities are aimed at enterprises that want to deploy a pair of Truffle devices in tandem to increase reliability.

For customers that want to reduce their capital expenditures, Mushroom Networks offers a broadband-bonding service, available for a monthly subscription fee. “We can host a peering unit for them, on behalf of them, in our data centers,” Akin says.

Another new feature geared for enterprise customers is the ability to spread a VPN session over multiple WAN connections to accelerate that VPN connection, Akin says. “The net effect is that the VPN connection is experiencing the total available bandwidth,” he says.

New QoS algorithms and application filtering let customers better prioritize and manage traffic. “Users can identify certain types of traffic, either by source IP, destination IP, or port number. We also have built-in fingerprinting technology for certain types of traffic,” Akin says. “After identifying the traffic, users can manipulate the traffic -- assign it to a specific wide-area network port, or apply quality of service measures, for example.”

Mushroom Networks, which is based in San Diego, says its technology is suited for small and midsize businesses, large enterprises, multi-tenant buildings and broadband service providers.

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.