Sandvine

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'.

Initial product sales focused at congestion management as operators struggled with the high growth of broadband. Many operators have shifted focus to revenue generating services and reducing operational expenditure.

In June 2007 Sandvine acquired CableMatrix Technologies for its PacketCable Multimedia (PCMM)-based PCRF that enable broadband operators to increase subscriber satisfaction while delivering media-rich IP applications and services such as SIP telephony, video streaming, on-line gaming, and videoconferencing.

Technology

Sandvine's technology focuses on policy management, including the control of spam, usage-based billing, quality of service, and P2P throttling. They use FreeBSD as the basis for their appliances.

Rather than identifying individual messages, spam control is based on identifying sources of spam from behaviors such as using multiple SMTP servers, using multiple source (EHLO) domains and large address books.

Quality of service control is provided for a range of media applications including video conferencing, VoIP and gaming.

The P2P throttling focuses on Gnutella, and uses a path cost algorithm to reduce speeds while still delivering the same content. Stateful Policy Management uses stateful deep-packet inspection and packet spoofing to allow the networking device to determine the details of the p2p conversation, including the hash requested. The device can then determine the optimal peer to use, and substitute it for the one selected by the P2P algorithm, by "[sitting] in the middle, imitating both ends of the connection, and sending reset packets to both client and server."

The usage-based-billing includes pre-paid and post-paid 3G and 4G mobile access, as well as all fixed access.

Network neutrality debate

Sandvine products were used by Comcast in the United States to limit number of sessions of Internet traffic generated by peer-to-peer file sharing software. Sandvine's current traffic discrimination product, Fairshare, is described in detail in an RFC.

According to independent testing, Comcast injected reset packets into peer-to-peer connections, which effectively caused a certain limited number of outbound connections to immediately terminate. This method of network management was described in the IEEE Communications, May 2000 article "Nonintrusive TCP Connection Admission Control for Bandwidth Management of an Internet Access Link".

A product whitepaper published by Sandvine confirms that its products are configurable to use "Session Management" capability to prevent customers using BitTorrent from providing uploads to peers who are not close to them on the network. This affects all uses of BitTorrent (such as open-source project distribution, patch distribution and illegal downloads).

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.