[February 27, 2004]

Tocatlian says the product is easy to manage. "We have CLI, a GUI, and even HP Openview integration."

The company hopes to serve ISPs of all sizes, but expects to reach the smallest companies through dialup wholesalers and resellers. "We won't be able to serve every ISP directly," he says. "We want to build an ecosystem that will give any ISP the opportunity to get a solution that is powered by Bytemobile."

Getting key endorsements
Wholsalers are happy with the product. We reach Even Katz of DialAssurance on a busy day. "We're doing a lot of network augmentation and new builds. Right now, we're in 21 states, and plan to be in 25 states by the end of March."

Before the buildout, he took the time to test several accelerators. He was particularly impressed by Bytemobile's image compression. "All of the competition reduces image quality. Even with no image loss, this annihilated all the others."

DialAssurance also sells SlipStream Data's accelerator. The acceleration market is competitive, and the products offered have genuine differences. Many wholesalers, who have to serve a diverse group of dialup ISP customers (small and large, urban and rural, for example), therefore choose to offer more than one accelerator because their customers demand a choice. This can make the business even more cutthroat for the companies supplying the software.

Acceleration is good for dialup ISPs. Katz is particularly pleased by the fact that acceleration rewards good users. "If they have a common usage pattern, if they're using the Internet for news and going to a common website like CNN, and they're not downloading, they will have a particularly good experience."

We also spoke to another wholesaler, one whose selection of Bytemobile is quite a surprise. The endorsement of Bytemobile by Serious ISP is particularly noteworthy because until a few months ago, the company sold its own proprietary accelerator (though that too was based on SlipStream Data's).

Doug LaDuron, the company's CEO and president, says that it became clear that the accelerator companies could build a better product than he could, so he chose to focus on the rest of the business.

For someone who had built his own accelerator, the operating system is a primary consideration. His explanation sounds like a business rule. "When you're deploying software, it's important that the platform and the OS is a current, stabilized platform."

LaDuron likes Bytemobile's SUN-based OS over competing products based on "older versions of Linux that are no longer supported" or based on Microsoft's operating system.

LaDuron was impressed by Propel's pop-up blocker, ad blocker, and file download accelerator, but has retained his company's software for each. (Bytemobile does not offer them, but is working on them. It expects its popup blocker to be ready for Q2, 2004, and a demo to be offered at ISPCON.)

"We weren't doing anything wrong," LaDuron explains. "But they did better than we did."

Pricing and availability
The product is available now in a wide variety of configurations, starting at $1,900 for a SunFire V120-based product that supports up to 1,000 concurrent users.

—End

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