Sandvine's CTO Discusses Recent Wins

   

Earlier this week, Sandvine announced 5 new customers (see "Sandvine Wins Five New Customers" - here)  - "three wireless operators and two DSL access providers .. The customers are located in the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Central America and the Caribbean".

One of the new customers is said to be using Sandvine solution for "VoIP Quality of Experience, to ensure subscribers’ satisfaction by monitoring the quality of experience of their VoIP calls".

In addition, "Three of the new customers purchased Sandvine’s new Policy Traffic Switch 22000 (PTS 22000) platform, which was announced earlier this year (here)"

In order to learn more about these issues, I spoke with Don Bowman (picture), Sandvine's CTO.

• According to Don, the "VoIP customer" (from South Africa), is using Sandvine to measure the quality (latency, jitter etc) of the different VoIP services on its network - its own and competitive OTT services. While there are customers that are also using Sandvine's gear to control the QoS of VoIP services, in this case the customer is only measuring the quality.
    
• The success of the recently announced PTS 22000 is due to its form factor and price/performance numbers. Operators are looking to save space and power and therefore see this model as particularly fitting their needs.  




PTS 22000


• Until recently, the common location for DPI devices in wireless networks was on the SSGN Gi interface. The PTS 22000 (and other models as well) may be placed on other interfaces providing higher granularity in managing wireless traffic - due to the support of stacked tunnels, such as MPLS over GTP. According to Don, in 3G networks, most customers will place Sandvine on the Gn or Gp interfaces. On LTE, most will place it on the S5, S1 or S8 interfaces (see diagram below)