The grant, approved by the Federal Government s Industry Research and Development Board and spread over three years, will be matched dollar for dollar by Stallion. The majority of these products will be aimed at fulfilling the bandwidth needs of small and medium sized businesses that don t have the financial or technical resources to deploy traditional data services. The Internet and ePipe will be able to provide secure, low-cost and scalable bandwidth between private sites. Currently, millions of small businesses are left without an affordable solution. Now with ePipe technology, there are significant cost savings of up to 80 per cent over conventional dedicated WAN or existing VPN solutions both in the initial capital outlay per site and in on-going telecomm charges.
Customers can save tens of thousands of dollars a year when compared with other solutions.
The chairman of the Industry Research and Development Board, Professor Don Anderson, said the project had great potential to benefit SMEs. The small business community is heavily dependent on affordable but effective communication. This pipe tunnels secure data between remote locations using the Internet at high speed. I2B eliminates the shortcomings of other techniques that cannot scale and inter-operate with the full range of Internet Service Providers in a VPN environment. It introduces no proprietary protocols and therefore works with any ISP in any region or country.