Camiant joins Comcast traffic shaping team

While deep packet inspection vendor Sandvine is most closely associated – at first clandestinely, and later somewhat notoriously -- with Comcast’s bandwidth management activities, the cable operator’s newly-announced approach features at least one additional vendor: policy control provider Camiant.

Camiant’s role is in keeping with the more sophisticated and fine-grained approach that Comcast is taking to broadband traffic shaping. Rather than targeting specific protocols such as BitTorrent – which drew the FCC’s attention and later rebuke – the new system (described here) focuses on heavy users, temporarily throttling back their access speeds during times of network congestion.

Comcast recently filed its new plans with the FCC, describing the approach in some detail and naming Sandvine, Camiant and a yet-to-be-chosen third vendor. “The new approach will focus on managing the traffic of those individuals who are using the most bandwidth at times when network congestion threatens to degrade subscribers’ broadband experience and who are contributing disproportionately to such congestion at those points in time,” Comcast said in its filing, adding that it had already trialed and fine-tuned the system in five systems.

Earlier this week, Sandvine issued a brief press release confirming Comcast’s use of its Congestion Management for Fairshare solution to determine when network segments are nearing congestion levels. When those levels are reached, the Sandvine solution will query another system – the Internet protocol detail record server – to see which users are over-consuming. Comcast has not yet selected the provider of the IPDR.

Finally, Camiant comes into play in its role as policy server, taking the user information from the IPDR server and instructing the network – specifically, the cable modem termination system – which users bandwidth to throttle back. The Camiant server then helps track the state of the network congestion and determines when to fully open the user’s connection back up.