Camiant joins Comcast traffic shaping team

Camiant vice president of business development Randy Fuller stopped by the Telephony offices recently, and while he declined to comment on the Comcast solution – citing confidentiality agreements with the operator – he noted that as traffic shaping tactics become more sophisticated, operators need more powerful rules-based policy servers beyond what ships with the typical deep packet inspection boxes.

“We can help do what [DPI boxes] cannot: manipulate the actual traffic on the network,” Fuller said.

While fair usage and net neutrality concerns – not to mention heavy P2P use and growing video streaming consumption -- are driving broadband ISPs to deploy policy-based network access control, the problem is becoming even more pressing on mobile broadband networks, Fuller said.

“The issue is much worse for mobile operators, they just don’t have the bandwidth. Some mechanism to control usage is even more critical for mobile broadband than even the fixed-line players,” he said. “A couple of years ago, [mobile operators] would say they’d die for people to use their [data] network. You don’t hear that anymore.”

Fuller said Camiant is in trials with three mobile operators on data bandwidth control deployments. He declined to name the customers, though Camiant did disclose details of its role in a Sprint Mobile voice over IP/IMS trial at the CTIA show this spring. That effort is less focused on managing bandwidth than reserving priority access for certain applications on a mobile network, such as carrier-provided voice over IP, Fuller said.