Sandvine
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| Sandvine Incorporated | |
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| Type | Public TSX: SVC AIM: SAND |
| Founded | Waterloo, Ontario (2001) |
| Headquarters | Waterloo, Ontario |
| Key people | Dave Caputo, Co-Founder, President and CEO Scott Hamilton, CFO Tom Donnelly, Co-Founder, EVP Marketing & Sales Brad Siim, Co-Founder, COO and VP Engineering Don Bowman, Co-Founder, CTO |
| Revenue | $73.7M (2007) |
| Employees | 350+ (Q1 2008) |
| Website | www.sandvine.com |
Sandvine Incorporated (TSX: SVC, AIM: SAND), is a networking equipment company based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Sandvine products are designed to implement broad network policies, ranging from service creation[1] through billing [2] through congestion management through security[3]. Sandvine targets its products at tier-1 (defined as more than 1 million subscribers) consumer broadband providers, including cable, DSL, mobile.
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[edit] Company history
Sandvine was formed in August 2001 in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, by a team of approximately 30 people from a recently closed Cisco acquisition, PixStream. An initial round of VC funding launched the company with $20M (Cdn). A subsequent round of financing of $19M (Cdn) was completed in May 2005.
In March 2006 Sandvine completed an initial public offering on the London AIM exchange under the ticker 'SAND'. In October 2006 Sandvine completed an initial public offering on the Toronto stock exchange under the ticker 'SVC'.
In June 2007, Sandvine purchased Simplicita and has been integrating Simplita's DNS services into its range of products and services. In June 2007, Sandvine purchased CableMatrix, forming the Service Delivery Business Unit (SDBU).
Initial product sales focused at congestion management as operators struggled with the high growth of broadband. As growth rates slowed down at the end of 2006, operators have shifted focus to revenue generating services and operational expenditure.
[edit] Technology
Sandvine's spam-source detection is novel in that it searches for 'sources of spam' rather than messages which are spam in content. The algorithm is documented in Sandvine's patent [4] [5] applications, focusing on behaviours inherent to spamming (e.g. using multiple SMTP servers, using multiple source (EHLO) domains, large address books, and other metrics).
Another aspect of Sandvine's technology which is novel is a gnutella-focused P2P path optimizer [6]. Bringing the path-costing of the physical topology into the P2P overlay topology allows a mode where congestion is reduced while still delivering the same content and bandwidth to each user. This is a form of least-cost-path routing using content (i.e. file hash) as the destination rather than layer 3 address.
End-to-end policy and QoS control is enabled via Sandvine's Service Delivery Engine [7] [8]. This unified policy management allows for guaranteed QoS for media applications such as video conferencing, VoIP, gaming, interacting with the access and core network. The SDE provides IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) standard interfaces, 3GPP standard interfaces, and CableLabs standard interfaces, as well as various Session Border Controller and VoIP softswitch interfaces.
The sandvine "monitoring tool ... [sits] in the middle, imitating both ends of the connection, and sending reset packets to both client and server." [9]
They call this approach "Stateful Policy Management" [10] which works by using stateful deep-packet inspection and packet spoofing. This technique allows the networking device to determine the details of the p2p conversation, including the hash requested. The device can then alter the traffic to augment the algorithms the protocol uses to determine the optimal peer to use, and instead substitute a more optimal peer that is preferable by L3 routing distance. In addition, the device can be used to introduce a network bias in the p2p traffic by allowing internal users to make requests to an external network, but "[turn] away requests from external users"[10], making the entire network a leech.
[edit] Controversy
Sandvine is reportedly being used by Comcast in the United States and by Bell Sympatico and Rogers Cable in Canada to slow down Internet traffic. Notably a lawsuit [1] was filed against Comcast [2] in November 2007, alleging that Comcast was blocking legal Internet use.
According to independent testing [3], Comcast injects forged reset packets into peer-to-peer connections, which effectively causes the connections to immediately terminate. The Canadian Association of Internet Providers has also requested that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission order Bell Canada to cease and desist from throttling its wholesale ADSL Access Services [4].
Although Comcast has not confirmed the details, a product whitepaper published by Sandvine confirms that its products are configured by default to use "Session Management" capability to prevent customers using BitTorrent from providing downloads to peers who are not close to them on the Comcast network. This same capability, however, interrupts legal uses of BitTorrent (such as open-source project distribution or patch distribution), and also reduces the quality of completely unrelated internet uses such as web browsing or gaming.
In cases where a subscriber is a “seeder” and uploads content to an off net “leecher”, session management is an effective strategy... the subscriber may be session managed without negative impact. This is the default behaviour for Sandvine’s session management policy and limits external leechers from connecting to internal seeds.[11]
[edit] References
- ^ Sandvine Incorporated: Press Release - StarHub Selects Sandvine to Deploy End-to-End PacketCable MultiMedia™ Solution
- ^ Sandvine Incorporated: Press Release - Major Wireless Carrier Selects Sandvine’s 10-Gigabit Ethernet Solution to Give Subscribers More Control over their Mobile Internet Experience
- ^ Adelphia Selects Sandvine to Protect Subscribers from Worms and Spam. - Free Online Library
- ^ A SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DETECTING SOURCES OF ABNORMAL COMPUTER NETWORK MESSAGES - Patent EP1743466
- ^ (WO/2005/109816) A SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DETECTING SOURCES OF ABNORMAL COMPUTER NETWORK MESSAGES
- ^ (WO/2003/094465) PATH OPTIMIZER FOR PEER TO PEER NETWORKS
- ^ Sandvine Incorporated: Service Delivery Engine
- ^ CNW Group | VECIMA NETWORKS INC. | CableMatrix and VCom Showcase First QoS Enhanced Video Conferencing over WiMAX Solution
- ^ Comcast traffic blocking: even more apps, groupware clients affected
- ^ a b "Meeting the Challenge of Today's Evasive P2P Traffic"
- ^ Session Management: BitTorrent Protocol - Managing the Impact on Subscriber Experience http://www.sandvine.com/general/getfile.asp?FILEID=21
