Astrocom Corporation's PowerLink-Iplus appliance promises improved load balancing and automatic line/ISP fail-over to ensure that a business served by multiple DSL lines stays connected even if one or more DSL lines go down.

by Wayne Kawamoto [August 13, 2001]

Astrocom Corporation, a provider of DSL technology, announced the general availability of its next generation DSL aggregator, the PowerLink-Iplus, with session load balancing and automatic line/ISP fail-over.

According to the company, PowerLink-Iplus combines multiple independent DSL lines into a single logical channel to support high-speed transmissions up to 6Mbps that are completely transparent to the network.

In addition to aggregating multiple DSL lines, the PowerLink-Iplus actively monitors the performance of each connection. Should one of the links (or ISP) fail for any reason, the device is designed to automatically forward the traffic to the active link(s)—and when the failed link is restored, the connection is recognized and placed back in the aggregation. From this perspective, the company says that its PowerLink-Iplus not only provides increased bandwidth, but also offers mission critical redundancy in the event of a link (or ISP) failure.

"There are really two major benefits for our ISP Partners," said Fred Sweeny, Astrocom's Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "First, PowerLink-Iplus now gives the ISP the opportunity to sell greater ranges of bandwidth to their business customers, while enabling the sales of multiple lines where they previously might only have sold one. Second, PowerLink-Iplus's fail-over features allow customer's networks greater levels of redundancy and reliability all the way to 100 percent uptime for mission critical applications. These new capabilities will allow the ISP to further differentiate their service offering with solutions that today's businesses truly need, more bandwidth and greater internet reliability."

One of the first production PowerLink-Iplus units was shipped on July 13, 2001 to J.L.Patterson Engineering & Associates, Inc., a Rail-Civil engineering firm in Orange, CA. The company used the device for 20 days on its network.

"The machine is working great, all my users are now getting phenomenal performance when web browsing," said Marcos Canas, Network Manager. "I'm seeing significantly faster file transfers on 30-80Mb files. Redundancy is really, really important to us. Our DSL lines here are pretty unstable and go down frequently. With PowerLink we're always up and we no longer see the delays in our e-mails that we used to experience. Our business is very time sensitive, so 100% uptime on our email and Internet access is critical."

Availability and pricing
The PowerLink-Iplus is available immediately. List price is $1,695.

—End