First, sandvine calls it an app for legacy reasons, but 100% that is the bit torrent protocol. I have insider knowledge that this is the case. So don’t get hung up on that. But you’re right to doubt them. They are a shell of what they once were. Their fixed deployments are quite small now and do not represent fiber at all, which just hit over 50% in availability in dense US areas. Sandvine is still in Comcast at 100% coverage and in Cox, but they’re tiny. Sandvine is a bit sparse in mobile, but still there solidly. I believe that bit torrent is rare in mobile. Like no shit. I believe them that it’s down in fixed copper (dsl and cable). But they’re missing 100% of fiber. Sandvine does pattern recognition primarily. It used to be great. I suspect it’s still pretty good. They claim better than 90% accuracy. I’m sure the data they have is correct. But what they get from their customers is definitely questionable at times. They’ve made some huge mistakes in the past, grabbing data for too short a period of time or not across a broad enough customer base. I’m sure that’s still the case. What we need is someone like Kentik, Deepfield, and anyone else doing flow correlation to release a report. But they won’t because no company gives away that kind of data anymore. So we’re stuck guessing.
First, sandvine calls it an app for legacy reasons, but 100% that is the bit torrent protocol. I have insider knowledge that this is the case. So don’t get hung up on that. But you’re right to doubt them. They are a shell of what they once were. Their fixed deployments are quite small now and do not represent fiber at all, which just hit over 50% in availability in dense US areas. Sandvine is still in Comcast at 100% coverage and in Cox, but they’re tiny. Sandvine is a bit sparse in mobile, but still there solidly. I believe that bit torrent is rare in mobile. Like no shit. I believe them that it’s down in fixed copper (dsl and cable). But they’re missing 100% of fiber. Sandvine does pattern recognition primarily. It used to be great. I suspect it’s still pretty good. They claim better than 90% accuracy. I’m sure the data they have is correct. But what they get from their customers is definitely questionable at times. They’ve made some huge mistakes in the past, grabbing data for too short a period of time or not across a broad enough customer base. I’m sure that’s still the case. What we need is someone like Kentik, Deepfield, and anyone else doing flow correlation to release a report. But they won’t because no company gives away that kind of data anymore. So we’re stuck guessing.