After seeing their sales drop substancialy due to legal uncertainties surrounding the use of Sandvine products, it looks like the company are trying to grab back some of the lucrative revenue.
http://www.sandvine.com/news/pr_detail.asp?ID=169Sandvine, a leading provider of intelligent broadband network solutions for DSL, cable, FTTx, fixed wireless and mobile operators, today announced the addition of Sandvine FairShare™ to enhance its suite of Traffic Optimization solutions.
FairShare automatically responds to the changing network environment and subscriber usage patterns in real-time. It collects subscriber usage metrics from various sources and analyzes the data according to sophisticated, configurable parameters. Based on the results, FairShare dynamically modifies policies to balance available bandwidth and resources among subscribers.
What this announcement is basically stating is that this equipment will throttle you based on a different set of parameters than just checking your running a p2p app, this new equipment they hope will ensure they can sell more product without crossing swords with the FCC over unfair network practices that their products allow and in my opinion encourage.
I think we can all see why its a lot cheaper for a ISP to buy a rack of these devices and make a few press releases about "network hogs" and other dubious claims than it is to actually fork out some hard currency on keeping up with the growing demand for online services, fine in the short term but in the long term indicative of poor ISP management policies, after all if you wont provide a service your customers will move to those that will.
