Etsdia is a private, Internet Service Provider based in Ghana with operations and offices in Ghana, Holland, Canada and the United States. Etsdia was founded almost 3 decades ago as a distribution company in West Africa. Abdourahmane Dia, as CEO and general manager, focused the company to become a high technology driven company in various services they provide. Today Etsdia’s operations span from processing 5,000 tons of fish per month to providing Internet service in Ghana with a disruptive approach leveraging Broadband Bonding technology.

At $60,000/month backbone connectivity with flaky performance was not a viable option

Etsdia founder Abdou Dia saw an opportunity to bring high-performance Internet access to West Africa but when he investigated the backhaul cost for his PoP (Point-of-Presence) the quote at $60,000 per month was a roadblock. With that type of a cost structure, his offering would be too expensive for his clients. He had heard about Mushroom Networks and after investigating he realized he had the answer with Mushroom Networks’ SD-WAN with Broadband Bonding, where Etsdia would be able combine up to 16 Internet lines and slash his total bandwidth cost by 10 times. 

After the proof of concept and full roll out, he realized the cost savings was just one of the many benefits, as Etsdia now had access to a very robust and high performance backhaul Internet connection which was fault tolerant. Being a technology savvy organization, Etsdia’s services are heavily dependent on virtualized technologies and services, accessing services in their data centers in Europe and North America. So, Etsdia leveraged Mushroom Networks’ virtualized Truffle V router installed on VMs in various data centers to create fast, bonded tunnels between locations. This not only provided the much needed speed and throughput between those locations, but also added high reliability for the services.

“Mushroom’s solution was tremendously helpful and really boosted the robustness of Etsdia’s network. I truly felt like I struck gold. This was a technology too good to be true, but I experienced the power of it firsthand. Mushroom’s technology really enabled a new class of services to Etsdia’s client base.” said Abdou Dia, owner and general manager of Etsdia.

“…It was beautiful. It was creating my own fiber without the cost. It was a huge game changer,” added Abdou. Once deployed, Mushroom’s appliances (virtual or physical appliances that Etsdia had installed), peered with each other to create overlay tunnels combining the locally available 2 or more Internet connections. The end result was that the Etsdia PoPs were interconnected with highly reliable and high-performance IP tunnels even though the underlying WAN services were not reliable by themselves.

The overlay tunnels were critical to Etsdia’s offering as they were heavily dependent on cloud-based services that required connectivity to data centers in various locations worldwide. Mushroom Networks’ tunnels acted as virtual fiber connections between those locations, for a fraction of the cost of fiber.

“…I tried some competing products and none of them were able to deliver the performance of Mushroom’s bonding technology as well as the application-specific performance. I now understand why Mushroom is known to be the inventor of bonding. It shows,” added Abdou.

Boost in WAN Performance:

Truffle appliances were used to bond two or three WAN circuits, per site, from carriers. The overall WAN metrics improved both for mission-critical applications such as Citrix and hosted VoIP, as well as best-effort traffic. This provided better Internet service as well as excellent cloud-based services for Etsdia’s client base.

Boost in WAN Reliability:

Since Truffle appliances are capable of self-healing and intelligently responding to network problems and then routing around those issues, WAN reliability was greatly improved.

Reduced WAN Cost:

Bandwidth monthly cost dropped from $60,000 to $6,000. This was a huge cost savings that Etsdia was able to pass on the savings on to their clients.

Quick Return on Investment:

The capital expenditure was recovered within a few weeks.

Etsida was able to enlarge the scope of its Internet Service offering by building a backend built by Mushroom Networks’ physical and virtual appliances. By creating overlay tunnels between Mushroom appliances that can combine various Internet lines, Etsdia was able to create high-speed IP tunnels that provided performance and reliability that no single service was able to come close to matching. Given the low cost requirements of the Mushroom appliances and the reduced cost of operating Etsdia’s network, the network upgrade was easy, quick on return on investment and future proof.