18 months after molting, Tasman Networks is confident that its long term bet on business copper networks will mint gold, as fiber deployment remains a distant dream in the real world.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [November 6, 2003]

Last week, at the conference of the Wall Street Technology Association, the focus was on data backup, which the routers of Tasman Networks do well. But the company's routers do a lot more.

It all dates back to 18 months ago, when the company changed its name from Tiara Networks to Tasman Networks. "We evolved to be more general purpose," explains Paul Smith, the company's CEO and president. "We went from solving a couple of problems extremely well to be a more general purpose company."

The company's routers aggregate several T-1 lines and also support a complete checklist of protocols including PPP, MLPPP, HDLC, Frame Relay, Multilink Frame Relay, RIP, OSPF, and even BGP4.

The products also support QoS policies, NAT, ACL, DHCP relay, and have passive protection from DoS attacks.

Smith thinks that ISPs will be most impressed with BGP4 support. "Even our smallest box supports BGP4. We provide a full routing table and support multiple peers. A CTO asked me how we did that without additional memory. The answer is that we have our own architecture."

The products come with 128 MB of RAM and can be upgraded to 256 MB of RAM. Smith says that BGP4 is important because it enables multihoming, and VRRP is important because it enables failover between dual routers.

Streets filled with copper, please advise
"Most businesses don't have fiber," Smith notes. "They rely on copper." He aims to turn that insight into gold, aided by lessons learned from an earlier job at home router maker Asanté, where he was senior vice president of worldwide marketing and sales.

"We were selling 10/100 Ethernet cards long before Fast Ethernet took over. We found people were installing the cards into new PCs in order to be future proof."

With its support for a complete portfolio of protocols, the company seems future proof already, but Smith has an extra trick up his sleeve.

The company's routers are priced to allow end users to pay for one T-1's worth of router capacity, but have extra capacity lying dormant and deployed. To turn on additional T-1s, end users need merely pay for a license key.

"With most products, you typically see a performance hit over four T-1s," notes Smith. "Our efficiency allows us to shine in data-intensive applications like backup and recovery."

Smith says that New York City brokerage houses are interested in bonded T-1s because they want to avoid the setup fees and recurring costs of DS-3s and OC-3s. A T-1 (or several of them) never seemed like such a bargain.

But people realize they need the bandwidth. Minds were focused in the Northeast by a recent power outage. "The power outage made people scratch their heads," says Smith. The result of all that thinking was more sales of backup and recovery plans, including more bandwidth, and more Tasman Networks routers.

Pricing and availability
Tasman Networks' routers are available now in a variety of prices and configurations. The Tasman 1004, the company's latest product, retails for $1,995 for a single T-1, with licenses for additional T-1s priced at $1,000 each.

The Tasman page also links to benchmarks produced by the Tolly Group, which say that on bonded T-1 lines, nothing less than a Cisco 3724 will do as well as the Tasman 1004.

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