Sandvine CEO Says Internet Monitoring a Necessity

Khalid Baheyeldin writes in with a CBC interview with the CEO of Sandvine, Dave Caputo (bio here). Sandvine is the Waterloo, Ontario-based company that provides the technology that Comcast and other ISPs use to overrule Net neutrality by, for example, injecting RST packets to disrupt Bittorrent traffic. Caputo says, among other things, that Internet monitoring is a necessity. Some of the comments to the interview are more tech-savvy than the interviewee comes across.

Comments

Gotta love those statements.

[khasim]

CBCNews.ca: Has the internet always been managed, because this idea of network management almost seems recent?

Caputo: I had dinner with Vint Cerf [a U.S.-based computer scientist often called the father of the Internet] probably a year back and I think he'll be the first to admit that he's surprised and shocked at what his authoring of TCP/IP has meant. If you look at that underlying transmission protocol, when you send a flow of packets -- if they're getting through -- they get bigger until you get congestion, then the packets get smaller. The idea of flow control in the internet has been a tenet of it since day one.

It really depends on where you draw the line on what management is. The service provider has to figure out the business model of how much service they're going to give a subscriber and how much bandwidth they're going to provide to the internet. That oversubscription ratio is their business model.

For every five megabits they sell you for $40, they buy a quarter of a megabit because they're planning on you not using your computer 24/7. They count on you being away at work or being asleep. They simply cannot provision that five megabits because that costs way more than what they're selling it to you for. They need people not using the internet for it to work at $40 a month. Now CBC may buy its one-megabit connection for $800 a month because it's a dedicated one-megabit connection.

...and...

CBCNews.ca: So theoretically an internet service provider could sell customers a dedicated peer-to-peer router?

Caputo: Conceivably. The beauty is to let the market figure it out, and it will.

So he wants to sell technology that allows the ISP's to OVERSELL their bandwidth while LYING to their customers and he refers to that as "the market".

How about just telling the customers EXACTLY what they're paying for?

For $40 you get a guaranteed MINIMUM bandwidth of X with a potential to burst to Y.

If you want more, you pay for more.

Re:Honestly, I'm SHOCKED!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I am shocked because Sandvine is a frequent supporter of Open Source Operating Systems and has contributed to BSD Conferences. I would have thought that they would support the openness of the internet too. Apparently, their monetary sponsorship of open source conferences are just a PR Stunt.

Sandvine is one of many telecomm gear companies that strongly support OSS. I used to work at a similar company with at least one ex-Sandvine co-worker. Basically, they build "devices" which they sell to ISPs and other big network operators. They build those devices with custom or off the shelf hardware combined with on OSS operating system, toolchain, and applications, plus a few closed source applications that contain their core competency and money proposition. This is often referred to as the "secret sauce" code.

These companies do support OSS and build their entire business model around it (in combination with some closed source). They aren't OSS zealots, but most of the employees are strong supporters of OSS and the companies are very good about contributing code back. A lot of the code in Linux and the BSDs is contributed by these companies. They support OSS conferences and the like, because they want to promote OSS, because it is a good way to recruit new talent, and because the improvements that come out of those conferences are often beneficial to their bottom line. A lot of people think OSS is created by hobbyists, but really Sandvine is a good example of who really makes up the OSS community and contributes code. It is mostly businesses who use it to make money in conjunction with hardware, services, or additional closed source software.