High Bandwidth Dissimilar Line Bonding From Mushroom Networks

How would you like to build your own fiber optic bandwidth broadband service without paying through the nose for SONET OC3 or higher level service? Can you do it by kludging together whatever you can find in the way of DSL, Cable broadband, T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth, or wireless Internet service? Not very well, and you know it. But what if there was an appliance available where you simply plug-in five or six of your favorite high speed connections of any type and it smoothly merges them into one screaming high bandwidth service?

"Impossible," you say. "We tried that with our routers and it didn't work at all."

Well, what you need is not another router. You need the new and improved Truffles from Mushroom Networks.

Last year, we thought the Truffle BBNA6401 was just the nuts (or fungi) for both WAN reliability and bandwidth expansion up to 50 Mbps. The "BBNA" stands for Broadband Bonding Networking Appliance. It could also mean Broad Band Network Aggregation, which is how the device works. It bonds broadband services to aggregate or combine their bandwidth into the equivalent of one faster line.

T1 line bonding is commonly available from competitive carriers. For every line to bond-in, you get an additional 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth. There are a couple of restrictions. It's usually only practical up to 10 or 12 Mbps and all the lines have to be identical and from a single supplier. The carrier supplies you with premises equipment that is similar to the equipment at their central office. That's what runs all those T1 lines in parallel so that you experience the equivalent of a single higher bandwidth line service.

The Truffle looks at that approach as keeping companies in the dark and feeding them fertilizer. Instead, they manage the bandwidth of the lines rather than the lines themselves. By keeping track of what requests go out which lines and what responses are received, the Truffle can mix and match any broadband service into a common bandwidth pool. It doesn't really matter what the characteristics of individual lines are. A DSL and T1 line can be paired, then aggregated with a cable modem signal, a satellite receiver and a wireless cellular aircard. Your composite bandwidth is the sum of the speed that each line transmits and receives.

You can see the advantage of this approach for growing bandwidth incrementally. You start with whatever you can get. Then add services as they become available or you can afford them. In addition to speeding up your WAN connection, you also get a boost in reliability. That DSL line may be moderately fast but flaky. The cable modem is cheap and screams with speed, but drops the connection a couple of times a day and some days goes down for hours. T1 lines are rock solid but the cost per Mbps is way more than with the shared "consumer" grade services. DS3 is fast and reliable but lease prices are in the 4 digits per month. Since it is unlikely that you'll lose every service at the same time, broadband bonding can give you solid connectivity all the time with high bandwidth most of the time.

In addition to the latest speed upgrade, Mushroom Networks now offers several flavors of Truffles for various size businesses and applications. The Porcini BBNA is intended for SMB and enterprise clients, apartments, hotels, hospitals and multi-tenant buildings that want to aggregate several types of Internet connection into one high reliability broadband service. The PortaBella BBNA is for portable or mobile applications. It aggregates the bandwidth of up to 5 USB wireless modem aircards. There's even an optional service offered that makes this solution suitable for high quality video streaming.

How Broadband Bonding is Mushrooming

Bandwidth hungry companies now have a mouth watering new approach to increasing their WAN capacity. It's a TRUFFLE from Mushroom Networks, Inc.

Just what makes this TRUFFLE appetizing? it has the capability of aggregating the bandwidth of multiple broadband connections to make one bigger, more reliable pipe. That seems to sound a lot like T1 line bonding. What's different is that this device can bond just about anything you've got. Gather up your DSL, Cable, T1 and satellite lines. Plug up to 6 of them into the TRUFFLE BBNA6401 and it combines their bandwidth to give you download speeds up to 50 Mbps.

The Mushroom Networks approach is to create bonding at the network layer using IP-based protocols. Traditional pair bonding approaches require all lines to be the same type and from the same provider. You order the amount of bandwidth you want and the carrier takes care of bonding enough T1 lines to give it to you. The implementation is pretty much transparent to the user because the carrier provides the CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) to bond the lines and deliver a single network interface to the user.

In contrast, the TRUFFLE is a piece of hardware that you buy and manage. You don't need to coordinate with your network service providers. This device simply connects to multiple broadband modems and manages the bandwidth pool. It has the smarts to divvy up a download request into pieces and request only a portion of the total file size from each broadband connection. It gathers the responses and reassembles the file before passing it on to your network.

Mushroom Networks suggests various scenarios that would benefit from aggregating the bandwidth of similar or diverse broadband connections. The obvious way is to combine multiple T1 or DSL lines to create a larger composite line speed. This could improve service reliability if the connections are from different providers with wires in different binder pairs or a combination of terrestrial and satellite services. Another suggestion is to add a DSL line to augment an integrated T1 telephone and Internet connection. When the T1 line is busy with many phone conversations, the DSL line can improve Internet performance to the computer users on the network.

Mushroom Networks' TRUFFLE is a clever solution to the ever-increasing need for higher and higher levels of business grade bandwidth by small to medium size companies. You may have more options that you think, with the recent Metro Ethernet and lower prices on T1 and DS3 connections. Check bandwidth options for your business location now.

If you also need support for your business telephone system, local area network or IT hardware and software, the VAR Network gives you a way to connect with qualified value added resellers in your area.