Since 1952, Kaptel has been the leading telecom service provider in South Louisiana and the Gulf Coast region. They are dedicated to establishing rewarding relationships with their residential and business customers by providing quality wireless, broadband, security, cable TV & digital telephone service. With their dedicated employees and access to an advanced telecommunications network, their primary goal is exceeding the expectations of their customers by providing real people in real time with real answers.

Providing reliable and redundant broadband connection for clients’ voice, video, and data needs

Relying on a single ISP link for critical internet connectivity often resulted in sub-par performance for cloud-based, real-time applications, as it is common for ISP links to suffer from performance fluctuations.

These fluctuations in the ISP network connectivity, including high latency, jitter, packet loss, cross traffic, backbone congestion and many other factors, were directly impacting voice quality of VoIP (Voice over IP) as well as IP-based VC (Video Conferencing) systems. Such fluctuations in the ISP links can be transient or long-lived and are therefore unpredictable. That meant the VoIP systems were experiencing hissing, crackling, echoes or gaps in conversations or even dropped calls as they were relying on a single ISP connection.

Kaptel decided to leverage the SD-WAN technology offered by Mushroom Networks.

Mushroom Networks’ unique and patented Broadband Bonding capable SD-WAN solutions leverage overlay tunnels that intelligently steer packets onto WAN paths in order to optimize application performance and reliability. “Mushroom Networks’ Truffle product allowed us to combine various fiber and DSL lines with satellite and LTE wireless to provide a reliable and redundant broadband connection for our clients’ voice, video and data needs”, said Carl A. Turnley, the president of Kaptel.

Mushroom Networks’ solution is unique with its ability to effectively and seamlessly combine and manage disparate ISP links with various transport and performance characteristics – a difficult technical challenge.

“Once we installed Mushroom Networks’ SD-WAN our clients bluntly stated, ‘Thank you for the super pipe’. Our clients depend on a high-performance Internet pipe for most of their voice and data applications”, added Mr. Turnley.

Kaptel’s focus on customer satisfaction and innovation has proven to be a natural fit for the partnership between Kaptel and Mushroom Networks in order to bring next-gen SD-WAN solutions to the Gulf Coast region for Kaptel’s enterprise and residential customer base.

Boost in WAN Performance:

Cognitive SD-WAN was used to bond together multiple WAN circuits. The overall WAN metrics improved both for mission-critical applications, such as VoIP and video, as well as best-effort traffic. This provided better Internet service as well as excellent cloud-based services for Kaptel’s residential and small and medium-sized business clients.

Boost in WAN Reliability and Redundancy:

Advanced aggregation tunnels implement sophisticated traffic management and WAN orchestration algorithms that are capable of intelligently responding to network problems and then routing around those issues, essentially resulting in a “self-healing” network with auto-failover capability.

Specialized SDN tunnels:

Cognitive SD-WAN with broadband bonding also provides for specialized aggregation tunnels. This means that tunnels customized for the specific application at hand will fit your networking needs like a glove. As an example, VoIP/SIP traffic is optimized with respect to the parameters that matter for VoIP flows in the network and therefore shields phone conversations against any network performance fluctuations and network outages.

Since 1952, Kaptel has been the leading telecom service provider in South Louisiana and the Gulf Coast region. They are dedicated to establishing rewarding relationships with their customers by providing quality wireless, broadband, security, cable TV & digital telephone service. With their dedicated employees and access to an advanced telecommunications network their primary goal is exceeding the expectations of their customers.

When Kaptel began investigating Broadband Bonding and SD-WAN solutions for residential customers as well as for small and medium-sized businesses in the Gulf Coast region, they chose Mushroom Networks’ state-of-the-art technology. The seamless and cost-effective integration of Mushroom Networks’ solution reaped significant benefit for their customers. VoIP users consistently achieved MOS scores of 4.5, outperforming dedicated DIA circuits for a fraction of the cost. And Mushroom Networks’ self-healing WAN orchestration resulted in networks that hide ISP connectivity issues (with bandwidth, latency, etc.) from the end user.

The SD-WAN with broadband bonding solution enabled intelligent management of the application traffic flows and the orchestration of the WAN connections to optimize end-user experience for VoIP services, inter-office communications as well as other Internet applications served by private, public or hybrid clouds.