Broadband bonding vendor Mushroom Networks names its first ISP customer

A year after its public launch, broadband bonding equipment vendor Mushroom Networks has announced its first Internet service provider customer: Southeastern Missouri's Semo.net.

Semo is using Mushroom's customer premises gear to bond its existing 3-Mb/s cable, DSL and wireless services and thereby sell a combined 9-Mb/s downstream, 5-Mb/s upstream service to business customers. (Customers who are close enough to a telco central office to get 6 Mb/s DSL could get a bonded service closer to 12 Mb/s for the same price, Semo said.) So while AT&T is selling 1.5-Mb/s T-1s for $575 per month, Semo is now offering six times that bandwidth for $500.

But Semo is touting not just speed but reliability; because each of the three lines can come from different providers (Semo resells broadband from incumbents such as AT&T and Windstream and uses wireless gear from Skypilot Networks), the service is uninterrupted if one of the three lines goes down.

"If we have four connections to the customer and three of those four go down, other than a little slowness, the customer never sees it – the VPN never dies," said Brian Becker, Semo's chief executive officer.

Becker said he investigated other options, most of which were load-balancing products and some of which were prohibitively expensive. He especially liked the flexibility of Mushroom's approach, since it relies on broadband services that don't require long-term contracts. "If, two months after we install a [Mushroom device], there's a new way to get access to that location, we can just plug it into the device," he said.

He also appreciated a modification the vendor made to its gear in response to Semo's request. Mushroom's gear typically uses the individual IP addresses of its constituent links – DSL, cable, etc. – to connect to the outside world. But one of Semo's customers, a bank that wanted to add VoIP to its already-full MPLS WAN, needed to regularly send financial information to the Federal Reserve without network address translations (NATs). So Mushroom changed its gear to pass real-world IPs through the bonded tunnel.

Semo hopes to use Mushroom to grow its business clientele, which today make up about 25% of its total customer base. Today Semo's less than 6,000 total customers are split evenly between broadband and dialup.

Mushroom, which launched publicly early last year, claims to have hundreds of business customers but hadn't named any ISP customers before today.