California Engineering Contractors, Inc. (CEC) recognized as one of the West Coast’s most reputable and reliable heavy construction contractors, regularly and successfully tackles difficult, complex projects with skill and apparent ease, consistently delivering top-quality work on time and within budget. The company’s well known focus on technically demanding and schedule-driven projects has characterized CEC since it opened its doors for business in 1972.

Mushroom Networks was tasked to solve a major pain point for CEC, which was slow Internet connectivity that severely impacted company operations. Legacy DIA (Direct Internet Access) lines with limited available bandwidth connected corporate headquarters (housing all major file and license servers) to offsite branch offices. As CEC grew in size, the DIA lines were simply not adequate to handle the growing mountain of data stemming from new contracts, CAD/CAM renderings, and thousands of files associated with large projects.

After assessing several options for replacing the outdated DIA lines, CEC opted to incorporate Mushroom Networks’ Truffle BBNA (Broadband Bonding Network Appliance) to bond together four separate DSL connections. By utilizing BBNA devices, CEC was able to create a dedicated connection between its offices and increase Internet connectivity speeds by a factor of ten. In addition, because the DSL service was acquired from various providers, CEC now enjoys near one hundred percent service uptime through the natural redundancies built into its network.

“CEC is known to implement innovative techniques and solutions to meet their client needs in the construction industry; we took the same approach in our Internet connectivity upgrade project,” said Sam Hanna, director of IT at California Engineering Contractors. “Reliability, speed and cost were the primary factors in our decision to replace our legacy DIA services. Our DIAs could no longer handle the data demands. When you consider that four DSL lines at 50 Mbps each can be bought for just $140 dollars or less, paying over $1,000 per month for only 1.54 Mbps of bandwidth seems silly. Not only did Mushroom Networks’ unique Broadband Bonding technology connect all of our offices together with high speed and reliability, it has allowed us to add additional capacity in increments based on our needs.”

A key issue facing businesses that house critical data in central locations or even at offsite data centers is the provisioning of the broadband connection which determines how much bandwidth is available to transfer the information. If the connection is too slow, business operations can be adversely affected and implementing a direct physical link between offices with MPLS or fiber is not economically feasible.

“Fast Internet has become the backbone for every business in every industry,” stated Dr. Cahit Akin, CEO of Mushroom Networks. “We are seeing this trend among all sizes of our enterprise clients from small and medium businesses to S&P 500 clients. Many companies like CEC are now moving away from legacy services such as T-1, ATM or ISDN that offer slow speeds and are very costly. By combining several inexpensive broadband connections into a single link with our Broadband Bonding appliances, we offer businesses an attractive alternative—fiber-like speed with high 9s availability at a fraction of what they are currently paying.”