ConteXtream Secured $14M - Investors Include Comcast and Verizon

    

ConteXtream, a startup in broadband traffic management space, introduced its solution and announced "that it has secured $14M in Series B financing bringing the company’s total financing to $29 million. Lead investor, Comcast Interactive Capital was joined by Verizon Investments Inc. (assisted by Verizon Ventures) as well as all existing investors Benhamou Global Ventures, Gemini Israel Funds, Norwest Venture Partners and Sofinnova Ventures."

See the (first ever) press release - "ConteXtream Introduces Service Delivery Grid, Enabling Network Operators to Unlock the Value of Their Broadband Networks"  - here.

The company’s product, Service Delivery Grid,  provides carriers with traffic management and control capabilities. One example is traffic steering (see chart below and here) where it "identifies traffic as part of a session and then forwards that traffic based on the characteristics (or "context") of the session – more precisely, based on the metadata associated with the session"

Does the CEO quote below refer to the new investors when talking about tier1 operators? (Comcast’s quote confirms them as one - "We invested in ConteXtream because, by cloud enabling our network, its Service Delivery Grid can help us continue to deliver exciting new services to our customers in a cost-effective way")

“Operators are under significant pressure to cost effectively monetize bandwidth and yet improve the subscriber experience,” said Yaron Simler, CEO of ConteXtream. “With active trials underway at a number of tier one operators, as well as the endorsement and quality of our investment team, ConteXtream brings a complete solution to help operators, for the first time, address their business needs.  It is clear that our timing is right, and there is a strong need for our Service Delivery Grid solution to address the major issues operators are facing.”

BBC: "traffic management may sometimes be necessary"

 

In a recent blog post to the BBC site, Erik Huggers, claims that "Until that capacity is in place, the BBC recognises that traffic management may sometimes be necessary for technical reasons - for example to cope with legitimate network congestion. But this should be the exception. An emerging trend towards network operators discriminating in favour of certain traffic based on who provides it, as part of commercial arrangements, is a worrying development.". Seems like "compromise" is a good, politically correct approach recently (a la Verizon-Google - here).

See "Net Neutrality and the BBC" - here. 

The worrying development is "TalkTalk, BT: we'd put iPlayer in the slow lane"- here. " Asked specifically if TalkTalk would afford more bandwidth to YouTube than the BBC's iPlayer if Google was prepared to pay, the company's executive director of strategy and regulation, Andrew Heaney, argued it would be "perfectly normal business practice to discriminate between them". "We would do a deal and look at YouTube and look at the BBC, and decide," he added.

 

Back to BBC - "We've expressed this and other concerns to the industry regulator Ofcom and to the European Commission as part of their consultation on the issue. At this stage new legislation is not needed, since effective new EU rules have already been passed. But we do need the determination of regulators to now fully implement these rules, to prevent the emergence of practices which undermine the open internet which we so often take for granted"