Connectify shifted its Speedify offering from beta testing to commercial service, enabling users to sign up for an application and service that bonds Wi-Fi, 3G, LTE and wired channels for greater bandwidth and faster connections.
Connectify is selling the service online at the speedify.com website. Subscriptions are offered at two tiers: 50 GB per month, which costs $9 monthly or $99 yearly; and unlimited, which costs $19 monthly or $199 yearly. Connectify is also offering negotiated enterprise rates.
The service is only available for Windows and OS X, with an application that links to a global network of Connectify's "Speed Servers" in the cloud. Speedify automatically detects and bonds active Internet connections such as Wi-Fi, DSL, Ethernet, 3G and LTE.
The service is designed to intelligently spread a customer's uploads and downloads across all available Internet connections for faster speeds and increased reliability. Connectify claims, for instance, that it combined DSL and 4G LTE connections with Speedify in lab testing. The DSL download speed was 0.97 Mbps, the LTE download was 4.81 Mbps and the bonded download achieved 5.37 Mbps.
Speedify has been in beta testing for a year with 3,000 users accessing the cloud-based service. "Our legion of beta testers performance-tested each new server we spun up with a variety of Internet connections from carriers across the globe. It's a feat that couldn't have been accomplished any other way, and it's a testament to the power of crowdsourcing," said Connectify CEO Alex Gizis.
In May 2013, Connectify launched a Kickstarter campaign to seek funding for its Connectify Switchboard, which it apparently renamed Speedify, given that a link on its campaign page says, "Switchboard is now available," but connects directly to the Speedify home page.
The company halted its 2013 Kickstarter campaign days after launching it, saying it was revising its plan to enable customers to run their own Switchboard Servers, either at home, at the office, or in a data center instead of always connecting through Connectify's in the cloud.
However, as noted, Speedify relies upon a global network of cloud-based speed servers, which was the original plan behind Connectify Switchboard.
In response to a query form FierceWirelessTech regarding Connectify's server strategy, company President Bhana Grover said the company discovered in working with its beta users that many of them wanted to use Connectify's own servers. "We ended up having both the Speed servers and the personal server this past year," Grover said via email.
She said the personal server portion of the original product is still in beta, "and we plan on version 1.0 sometime this fall." "Having both as the same product started becoming very confusing to our customers," Grover added.
For more:
- see this Connectify release
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