Sandvine Expands Cable Support In Bandwidth-Management Platform

Sandvine, whose bandwidth-management system is used by Comcast and other operators, has expanded the product's capabilities for cable networks, including interoperability with DOCSIS 3.0-based cable modem termination systems.

The latest release of the Fairshare Traffic Management system, version 3.2, is in beta trials at four "tier-one" cable service provider networks in North America and Europe, according to Sandvine. The company's customers include Comcast, which installed the Fairshare system as part of its "protocol-agnostic" bandwidth management approach after getting called on the carpet by the Federal Communications Commission for blocking upstream BitTorrent requests. Almost half of Sandvine's Fairshare Traffic Management customers are mobile network operators.

"Broadband connections are increasingly being managed to ensure that all users and applications receive a fair share of network resources," said Tom Donnelly, Sandvine executive vice president of marketing and sales. "Fairshare Traffic Management is on its third iteration to address the growing complexity of modern operator networks. Our product manages traffic in a way that considers all types of use cases and variations of applications, users and congestion state."