Intellectual Property Law

Sandvine Unveils New Broadband Network Management Tech

By Cynthia Brumfield

Canadian broadband network management technology company Sandvine will unveil today at the NCTA show a new tool for allowing broadband operators to manage broadband traffic during periods of congestion. Sandvine got caught up in the recent controversy surrounding Comcast's throttling of P2P applications because the company reportedly supplied the underlying technology that enabled Comcast to use packet resets technology to slow-down customers' P2P uploads.

Called FairShare, the new Sandvine technology is aimed at helping broadband providers manage traffic in an application agnostic manner, an approach that Comcast announced earlier this year it will implement in lieu of its P2P-targeted approach. Instead of targeting particular applications, such as P2P, the new technology will take into account the level of bandwidth consumed regardless of the applications involved.

According to the press release, "FairShare automatically responds to the changing network environment and subscriber usage patterns in real-time. It collects subscriber usage metrics from various sources and analyzes the data according to sophisticated, configurable parameters. Based on the results, FairShare dynamically modifies policies to balance available bandwidth and resources among subscribers."

I'm meeting with the Sandvine folks later today and will update this post with more information after I get the briefing.

Separately, Comcast announced yesterday that it has participated in a $9.5 funding round of Seattle-based GridNetworks, which has a software technology for distributing high-quality video over the Internet in a P2P manner. The funding round was led by Cisco and Panorama Capital.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on May 19, 2008 (boomark / email).