utilize all 3 DSL lines simultaneously, and therefore gets 3 times the speed and throughput.” In other words, it’s all about meeting customer demand for the extra bandwidth needed to handle increasing data traffic.
Since the introduction of its Truffle network appliance in 2008 (at a price of almost $3,000), Mushroom added a wireless capability to its mix of 
conventional network bonding with its Porcini device, and the PortaBella, a device that bonds as many as four cellular data cards (each for a different wireless carrier) into a single, high-speed mobile Internet connection. (The downside is that the user must pay the monthly user fees charged for each wireless carrier.) It’s an elegant solution for just-about-anywhere mobile Internet service if you’re on the road again with Willie Nelson, as Wired magazine noted in October.
“Our high-end flavor of the Truffle has the capability of addressing a big pain point for enterprise clients with branch offices,” Akin says. “They’ll use whatever service is available at their remote offices to connect to their headquarters. That connectivity is becoming more and more important to them, and their pain point is how to get more bandwidth” without paying the high cost for a satellite or other high-speed broadband connection.
“When the economy took a hit, we weren’t sure how we’d be affected,” Akin tells me. “But the cost-savings angle really played nicely with our customers’ needs.” As corporate customers looked for ways to cut their costs, Akin says, “some of our projects all of a sudden became a priority mandated by the C-level executives.”
In April, the company introduced
