Craftsman Studio is a San Diego, California family owned business in operation since 1997. In the San Diego retail store one can find a broad selection of woodworking hand tools from quality makers. Bill Kohr, the company owner, concurrently manages their highly successful ecommerce website, CraftsmanStudio.com, catering to woodcarvers and woodworkers focused on building fine furniture. Eighty percent of Craftsman Studio’s revenues now accrue from sales through the website.

As a woodworker, Kohr selects only high quality hand tools to offer in his store. As a former Chief Information Officer, he appreciates the importance of fast and reliable Internet connectivity.

Craftsman Studio’s retail store and office recently moved to a newly developed location with minimal internet connectivity. Bill Kohr, the company owner, was searching for a solution which would provide the upstream bandwidth needed to push frequent updates to their data center hosted website.

A standard DSL line would provide only about 200Kbps upload speed for Craftsman Studio because the new location was far from the Internet Service Provider’s central office. Craftsman Studio makes updates to its website daily and needs to be able to quickly change pricing and images. With thousands of HTML pages and images, this solution did not provide sufficient bandwidth to support the website.

A single T1 line would have provided sufficient bandwidth but at a fairly high cost with minimal fault tolerance and the requirement for a long‐term contract.

After analyzing the various options, Kohr decided to find a method to connect multiple inexpensive DSL lines. He came across the Mushroom Networks’ Truffle BBNA (Broadband Bonding Network Appliance) —a perfect solution for his Internet needs. The Truffle BBNA combines multiple Internet access lines into a single aggregated line. The aggregation over the Internet lines is done even for a single session, providing the full speed of the lines combined.

In Craftsman Studio’s case, the Truffle bonds four separate AT&T DSL connections. Kohr also has his Truffle peered to a Mushroom Networks Bonding Proxy Server (BPS) in the Mushroom Networks data center. By using the Truffle in its Peered Mode, Kohr was able to obtain speeds nearly equal to a T1—at a fraction of the cost. Additionally, because there are now multiple DSL lines coming into the Truffle BBNA, Craftsman Studio enjoys near one hundred percent service uptime through the redundancies now built into its network.