Willie Nelson's success story | Mushroom Networks

Case Study - Willie Nelson

Willie ditches the satellite and keeps in touch with fans by harnessing the power of four wireless USB cards.

Industry

Entertainment / Transportation

Challenge

Satellite connectivity in the tour bus not fast enough and not economical.

Solution

Bonding four 3G/4G cellular modems with Mushroom’s Portabella router.

Benefits

•Aggregated speed for faster Internet access

•Higher Quality of Experience with real time applications such as VOIP

•Automatic recovery from network problems without requiring human intervention

•Significant cost savings compared to satellite based service.

Willie Nelson’s tour group will use the Portabella as they travel on average 200 days per year performing their American country classics from coast to coast and raising awareness for some of the great social causes that Willie Nelson is involved with including Farm Aid. Utilizing the ultra fast connection, the team has the ability to quickly upload music performances, update media rich website content, browse the web and communicate via VoIP.

Mushroom Network’s Portabella is a small form factor networking device that provides extremely fast and cost effective Internet connectivity for mobile and portable deployments.

The device combines the bandwidth capacity of as many as five USB based cellular data cards, providing increased access speeds both in the uplink and downlink directions and has an Ethernet based LAN port to connect to a local network or multiple devices at the mobile location for bandwidth sharing.

“Touring groups, including ours, commonly made use of satellite or a single router to connect online as we traveled from venue to venue, which can be expensive and at times extremely slow. Due to Mushroom’s Portabella cutting edge technology, we can now use our current laptop data cards and bond them together to create an incredibly fast connection for the entire bus. Because Portabella allows us to utilize mobile broadband services from multiple carriers we rarely lose connection even in rural areas or if one card goes down.”

David Anderson, Tour Manager for Willie Nelson