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Feb 20
Session Qualifiers…what have you done for me lately?
icon1 Posted by Nicolas St. Pierre in Network Policy Control Market, Service Innovation on February 20th, 2013 | No Comments - Reply Now

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For the past 10 years, we’ve been hearing about IPv4 address space depletion and I always took it with a slight shrug, believing that there would be ways to manage a punctual migration to IPv6.   I was of the opinion that just like the Netware server forgotten in my basement, IPv4 would be with us for the next 20 years (at least!) as the world pursued its migration to IPv6.

But recently I’ve had a change of heart.  Carriers have had to deal with a very tight supply of IPv4 space, and some years ago, started to re-use internal (RFC1918) IP space for network element addressing.   We’re faced with such a large explosion of mobile device and IP-aware machines that it has become imperative to use Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CG-NAT) to stave off the lack of IP address resources.

Now, NAT and CG-NAT certainly aren’t that new, but recent standards such as RFC6598 enable service providers to deploy address translation (NAT44, NAT444) within a better established framework. Read the rest of this entry »

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Oct 23
Groundhog Day…in Europe?
icon1 Posted by Dan Deeth in Regulatory/Legislative Developments on October 23rd, 2012 | No Comments - Reply Now

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Guest post by Rick Wadsworth – Director, Investor Relations

You may remember the 1993 Bill Murray film, Groundhog Day. In it, a weatherman (Murray) finds himself living the same day (February 2: Groundhog Day) over and over again. Not Murray’s best work in my humble opinion, but hardly the point. The point is: I’m feeling a bit like that weatherman these days.

Sandvine has been advocating on Network Neutrality and other industry issues (usage-based billing, online privacy, bill shock, broadband measurement, etc.) for years. We have made formal submissions, reply comments, replies to the reply comments, final arguments, live presentations, etc, to:

  • the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
  • the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)
  • the European Commission (EC), and
  • the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC).

See our website for more details.

Most recently, we responded to an EC consultation on “specific aspects of transparency, traffic management and switching in an Open Internet”. It made me wonder whether Groundhog Day (or at least Murray’s film version of it), had spread to Europe, despite its uniquely North American origins.

In the EC consultation (and previous Murray-esque iterations of it), we are asked whether the use of deep packet inspection (DPI)—a ubiquitous and time-tested Internet technology—represents a de facto invasion of privacy. Our reply:

Privacy is about use cases, not technologies.

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Jul 19
Behind the Scenes of the 6-Strikes Copyright Alert System
icon1 Posted by Don Bowman in Regulatory/Legislative Developments on July 19th, 2012 | 10 Comments

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On July 1, 2012 television, movie, music businesses, as well as major Communications Service Providers (CSPs) in the US (including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner Cable) started implementing a voluntary Copyright Alert System, often referred to as the “6-strikes rule” to reduce online copyright infringement in the US.  The agreement seeks to create balance between rights to privacy as well as rights to content, an argument which had put the CSPs in the middle.

Previous to this agreement, using the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a content holder would typically go to a CSP and request the identity of a suspected infringer, and then notify them directly.  This had lead to a large number of blanket lawsuits and a large amount of work for the CSP to lookup who had a specific IP address at some time, which is why the Copyright Alert System was created.

So how does the identification of suspected copyright infringement occur? Is your ISP snooping on you? In a nutshell:  the detection is done by a 3rd party, not by your ISP and it is done off the network.  To answer this question more thoroughly, let’s first look at how that information is collected, by examining how one of the most popular P2P filesharing networks works – BitTorrent.

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May 4
The Need to Optimize Video Optimization
icon1 Posted by Don Bowman in Network Policy Control Market on May 4th, 2012 | No Comments - Reply Now

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Networks are teeming with video and audio streaming – our newly released Global Internet Phenomena Report revealed that streaming comprises more than half of mobile data traffic in North America, from frontrunner content providers such as YouTube, Pandora and Netflix, to a wide range of others. The massive growth of video drives operators to seek methods to optimize this traffic, but buyers beware! Not all video optimization techniques are able to achieve the network savings that operators are seeking and the quality of experience that subscribers are demanding.

In order to perform deep video optimization, you have to be able to identify and modify the elementary IP traffic stream. Foremost, to identify video, you need to accurately recognize all IP protocols that are used for transmission. This is no easy task, as the list of protocols continues to evolve: RTSP, RTP, RTMP, Flash, MPEG, as well as peercasting (PPStream, Octoshape), placeshifting (Slingbox), and specific streaming sites and services (Netflix, NCAA, Hulu, YouTube, Google Video, BBC iPlayer). Not all vendors are able to identify and classify the full suite of IP protocols. For instance, given Apple’s lack of support for flash, YouTube has been forced to support two different video types: HTML5 and Adobe Flash. In a mobile network, the HTML5 tends to dominate given the smartphone mix of the devices.

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