Sandvine, whose network-management platform is used by Comcast and other major Internet service providers, is upgrading its flagship product to handle six times as much throughput per box as its previous generation.
The vendor's new Policy Traffic Switch 24000 offers throughput of up to 60 Gbps per box with clustering up to 240 Gbps, compared with the PTS 14000, which provides up to 10 Gbps per box and clustering up to 80 Gbps.
In addition, the PTS 24000 can handle up to 5 million subscribers per box, versus 1 million with the PTS 14000. "In the mobile environment you run into the limit on subscribers first," Sandvine chief technology officer Don Bowman said.
The PTS 24000 will be available for sale in the fourth quarter. Sandvine said two European service providers - a wireless service provider serving nearly 20 million mobile customers and a wireline ISP with 1 million subscribers - are deploying the new system.
In the U.S., Comcast is one of Sandvine's biggest customers. Last year, the MSO was ordered by the Federal Communications Commission to stop throttling back bandwidth available to peer-to-peer applications; instead, Comcast now curtails bandwidth available to users who exceed consumption thresholds using the Sandvine PTS system.
