Located in Midlothian, Texas, SKYBEAM-Texas provides high-speed broadband services via fixed wireless technologies across four northern Texas counties. Services include Internet access, local and long distance phone, managed WAN and firewall, and Web hosting and collocation. SKYBEAM-Texas initially deployed a set of MicroTik routers at tower sites to provide its customers with high-speed broadband connectivity. When its aging routers were plagued by instability and performance issues,

SKYBEAM-Texas quickly determined it needed a more reliable, high-performance routing solution to allow it to grow and provide the level of service customers demanded. The company replaced the existing tower site routers with Vyatta 514 appliances -- small form-factor appliances that integrate Vyatta's award-winning open-source routing and security software with high-performance, low-cost hardware. After standardizing its customer-facing network on Vyatta, SKYBEAM-Texas also deployed multiple Vyatta 2502 appliances to provide corporate VPN functionality.

"We had to reboot our old routers every couple of days or they would stop passing traffic," said Phil Walsh, general manager at Skybeam. "We've never had an issue with Vyatta's appliances and Vyatta has improved the throughput of our network everywhere we have installed it. Vyatta's price point was a plus, offering equal or superior performance at a lower cost when compared to Cisco, but frankly, that wasn't a driver for us as much as Vyatta's performance and stability."

Vyatta appliances deliver a broad range of networking features including integrated BGP, OSPF, and RIP routing; stateful firewall; IPsec and PPTP VPNs; quality of service (QoS); WAN load balancing; WAN interface capabilities from ADSL to T3; and LAN interface capabilities up to 10 Gbps, all for a single low price. In contrast, proprietary vendors often charge thousands of dollars extra for many of the features that come standard with Vyatta. Vyatta is running thousands of networks worldwide, assisting network managers to deliver network services and performance while remaining in-budget.

"Vyatta's open networking solutions deliver the performance and reliability demanded by mission critical networks," said Kelly Herrell, CEO of Vyatta. "SKYBEAM-Texas's experience is confirmed by countless other customers every day. Best of all, Vyatta's high performance, highly-reliable network operating system is cost effective and within reach of every mission critical network, not matter how large or small."