Mushroom Networks and One Shop Wireless announced today that they are partnering to offer Mushroom’s broadband bonding solution to T-Mobile USA enterprise customers around the country.
One Shop Wireless is a T-Mobile USA national master agent based in Tampa, Fla. The FCC recently approved T-Mobile USA’s merger with MetroPCS to create a new No. 4 carrier.
San Diego-based Mushroom Networks provides a broadband bonding solution: basically, using software to aggregate wired and wireless resources for Wide Area Network connections to create a faster and more reliable connection. According to Cahit Jay Akin, CEO of Mushroom Networks, the aggregation of resources offers a less expensive option for scaling enterprise connectivity than, say, increasing the size of an MPLS port. Their technology also plays into the broader trend of network function virtualization that was so prominent at Mobile World Congress 2013 — Akin calls it WAN virtualization.
“Similar to other virtualization concepts, it is an intelligent layer that sits on top of real resources and manages them intelligently. Those resources are Internet lines,” he said. “They can be wired resources of any kind, or wireless resources, 3G or 4G.”
Mushroom provides a network box that contains software that manages the broadband connections of a business, wired or wireless, and can shield applications from outages on any of the connections. According to a Mushroom white paper on broadband bonding, its technology is distinct from load balancing in that Mushroom’s Truffle solution “provides link bonding for HTTP-based data transfers in the downlink direction. With link bonding, the access links are effectively combined together into a single virtual pipe so that the data transfer rate of the virtual pipe is the sum of the data transfer rates of the access links that are being combined. Load balancing devices simply distribute load at the granularity of session,” and might use only the resources of one line to transfer data even when other lines are idle.
Some of the company’s case studies include bonding wireless cards from multiple carriers in order to provide the necessary bandwidth and coverage for first-responders using mobile broadband in Paulding County, Ga.
The partnership with One Shop Wireless expands Mushroom’s product portfolio to more of its target SMBs.
Gillian Foley, vice president of One Shop Wireless, said that the partnership gives T-Mobile customers “the cost-effective, intelligent and flexible router solutions they require, and provides them with the tools necessary to more effectively manage bandwidth across wireless and wireline connections.”
