A major challenge for network operators is maintaining accurate and granular visibility into the traffic on their network. Sandvine releases new versions of our application signatures regularly to support network operators who offer integrated over-the-top (OTT) services and optimized delivery of OTT content. These services have a higher level of urgency to ensure the most accurate classification for popular applications. To aid both operators and application providers, Sandvine developed the API Gateway. It enables OTT content providers to share application identification details with Sandvine to automatically recognize their traffic and ensure there is never an interruption to the services that subscriber’s value.

So, what’s the Win-Win-Win?

First, there are substantial benefits for network operators and their subscribers, and for content providers. Sandvine’s Active Network Intelligence products are already deployed at hundreds of network operators globally; we have thousands of applications and protocols currently in our database, and this is the foundation of many operators’ content-based service plans.  The strength of Sandvine’s application recognition can be seen in the Global Internet Phenomena Report, where we report on the top applications across multiple categories, giving those developers a boost in name recognition and prestige.

By “turning on” Sandvine’s API Gateway, network operators can be more confident that when they build services around OTT content, subscribers will get a consistent experience and billing. The API Gateway allows content providers to facilitate a consistent quality of experience (QoE) for delivery of their content, since the operator will always be able to correctly identify and manage the user experience. Subscribers will benefit as they thrive on content services and expect a consistent experience when accessing that content.  

Secondly, by using the Sandvine API Gateway, there is no resource burden incurred by either network operators or content providers; you simply update a list of IPs or CDN ranges to ensure consistent classification of your traffic (or sub-classification within an application).

The result is to eliminate any service interruption to our global network operator customers who use Sandvine products to build services around OTT content. In the event that a change is made on the content provider’s side (which might be encryption-related, a change to the protocol/application handshake, something else), there may be a short lag before these changes are identified and new signatures are deployed by Sandvine. The API Gateway makes a real-time update to all Sandvine solutions deployed worldwide.

The API Gateway doesn’t mean Sandvine will cease our own constant traffic classification research, but it helps to ensure that if changes are made by a major content provider, the network operator’s differential charging, sponsored content implementation, or other services won’t be temporarily impacted.

We are excited to be able to assure our global customer base that we work directly with an ever-expanding list of OTT content providers in this way, and that network operators can build offerings around these applications and protocols with 100% confidence that the subscribers who utilize these services will have the very best experience possible.

For more information, or to log in to the portal and register your application/protocol, click here.