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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], billing [2], congestion management, and security[3]. Sandvine targets its products at tier-1 (defined as more than 1 million subscribers) consumer broadband providers, including cable, DSL, and mobile.
[edit] Company historySandvine 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 the Israeli start-up CableMatrix, forming the Service Delivery Business Unit (SDBU).[4] 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] TechnologySandvine's technology focuses on policy management, including the control of spam, quality of service, and P2P path optimisation. 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.[5][6] Quality of service control is provided for a range of media applications including video conferencing, VoIP and gaming.[7][8]. The P2P path optimizer [9] focuses on Gnutella, and uses a path cost algorithm to reduce congestion while still delivering the same content. Stateful Policy Management [10] 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." [11] [edit] ControversySandvine products were used by Comcast in the United States to slow down Internet traffic generated by peer-to-peer file sharing software.[12] According to independent testing[13], Comcast injected forged 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"[14][15]. A product whitepaper published by Sandvine confirms that its products are configurable to use "Session Management" capability to prevent customers using BitTorrent from providing downloads to peers who are not close to them on the network. This affects many legal uses of BitTorrent (such as open-source project distribution and patch distribution).
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