One of the more unusual companies at ISPCON was delivering a new kind of P2P network from South Africa.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 7, 2007]

Gauteng, South Africa-based VPN software provider Trispen is named after a fictional plant. In the book by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, "The Meaning of Liff", Trispen is defined as, "a form of intelligent grass. It grows a single, tough stalk and makes its home on lawns. When it sees the lawnmower coming it lies down and pops up again after it has gone by."

The company, Trispen Technologies, is not at all fictional.

The company's P2P VPN product, @TheOffice Wherever!, is available to ISPs. A P2P VPN product sounds new and trendy, but the company's been offering the service to government customers since 1998, and was incorporated in 1999. Initially, the company specialized in ultra-secure VPN appliances.

The company also works with the satellite industry, through a partnership with XipLink, to provide VPNs that can handle the latency of satellite internet technology.

Yes, it's called @TheOffice Wherever!
The core of the product is a public key infrastructure (PKI) that the company says is easy to install and configure. At ISP-Planet, we do not have a test lab. If this product is of interest to you, you will definitely want to test it yourself.

If it works as advertised, however, it could allow you to serve your small business customers a big business service at a per-user price. Per-user pricing works for business services because business customers, unlike residential customers, are willing to pay for services offered by the ISP.

ISPs retain the customer information. Trispen assigns a contract ID number to each customer, and the ISP handles the details.

Asked by e-mail whether the P2P technology would work if there are few Trispen customers in an area (or in the entire country), the company's CEO, Jaco Botha, writes:

"Our software does not rely on any other P2P clients to forward traffic. Our software always tries to build a connection between the Client and the Gateway directly. This works in about 95 percent of cases. In some situations (the other 5 percent of cases) the software will relay traffic via our lookup servers. Depending on location of the Gateway and Client this may introduce additional latency and performance degradation. Since we are not in control of the underlying Internet, we cannot guarantee QOS though, and our solution may not work in all scenarios. In some cases customers can change their firewall settings to avoid relaying, thereby improving throughput."

For businesses behind a firewall, the software uses methods invented by VoIP provider, Botha writes. The software uses the open source STUN protocol. It assigns each client a virtual IP address for the purpose of the VPN. This virtual address is used only by the @TheOffice Wherever! software.

Pricing and availability
The @TheOffice Wherever! P2P VPN product is available now. ISPs can own-brand the product, co-brand the product, or brand it as "powered by" Trispen. Botha expects ISPs to sell the product at a suggested price of $7.50 per user per month. Depending on the branding model and ISP commitments, Trispen takes between 25 and 75 percent of that, billed to the ISP monthly.

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