Tied to a broader set of broadband internet disclosures, Comcast published an update  Monday (June 11) confirming that a congestion management system that was initially deployed in 2008 has been deactivated.

Back in 2008, Comcast hooked up with vendors such as Sandvine on a “protocol-agnostic” bandwidth management technique that followed an FCC order that Comcast stop using another technique that was targeted to peer-to-peer applications.

RELATED: Comcast Spells Out How it Will Curb Internet Hogs

The update coincided with the June 11 rollback of the FCC’s network neutrality rules (the FCC still employs transparency requirements of ISPs), and also a pledge by Comcast that it would continue to support a neutral and open internet along with a link to disclosures stating that the cable operator does not block or throttle or prioritize for pay or otherwise favor affiliated content online.

RELATED: Comcast: We Don’t Block or Prioritize for Pay 

Though Comcast deactivated the system it introduced in 2008, it left the door open if it needed to be revisited.

“As our network technologies and usage of the network continue to evolve, we reserve the right to implement a new congestion management system if necessary in the performance of reasonable network management and in order to maintain a good broadband Internet access service experience for our customers, and will provide updates here as well as other locations if a new system is implemented,” Comcast explained.

Though the original congestion management system was deemed officially deactivated with the June 11 update, it previously had been in place but left unused for more than a year, according to a Comcast official.

The official added that Comcast’s widespread deployment of DOCSIS 3.0, which adds capacity through channel bonding, and its more recent updates to DOCSIS 3.1 have obviated the need for the old congestion management system.

The vast majority of Comcast’s footprint has been upgraded to DOCSIS 3.0 or above. Comcast, ended Q1 2018 with about 90% of its footprint upgraded for 1-Gig and DOCSIS 3.1, and expects to complete that deployment by the end of 2018.

RELATED: Comcast Brings DOCSIS 3.1 to More Markets

Though Comcast’s congestion management system has been shut down, the company still employs data usage policies for its residential broadband service alongside an unlimited data option in most of its service areas. Those plans do not apply to business internet customers or to Gigabit Pro, a residential FTTP product that delivers 2 Gbps symmetrical internet service.

RELATED: Comcast Deploys 1-Terabyte Data Plan

Procera Networks said it has wrapped up its C$562 million (US$456 million) acquisition of fellow bandwidth management and policy vendor Sandvine.

The combined firm, which will drive more scale into the company, will operate under the Sandvine name and its technology together will “touch” 1.7 billion subs across a base of service providers and enterprise and government customers worldwide, it said.

The combined company is led by president and CEO Lyndon Cantor.

Looking ahead, the new Sandvine will take a closer look at 5G and IoT, intending to drive network intelligence into those platforms and the automation market.

PNI Canada Acquireco Corp., an affiliate of Francisco Partners and Procera, secured the deal for Sandvine after beating out an earlier, lower bid by Vector Capital affiliate Scalar AcquireCo Corp. that was announced in May.

PNI Locks in Deal to Buy Sandvine

“The new Sandvine has significant scale with over 200 Tier 1 service providers, including 12 of the top 20 mobile carriers and covering over 1.7 billion subscribers, over 500 enterprise customers, and over 40 OEM partners in nearly 100 countries worldwide,” Cantor said in a statement. “This scale will enable us to accelerate our innovation engine and expand our solution and services offerings to better serve our customers’ needs.”

Peer-to-peer technology tends to get a bad rap in cable-technology circles. Historically, it’s been known as a bandwidth hog and an approach that applies major stress to the upstream path of the high-speed data network.

Teltoo, a startup based in Madrid, Spain, is looking to alter that conversation with a cable- and ISP-friendly approach to P2P that is designed to allow partners to manage how bandwidth is allocated while also driving much more scale into over-the-top video, particularly for the highly-viewed “tentpole” TV events that have wreaked havoc on some OTT video players, including a new breed of virtual MVPDs.

Teltoo’s approach is not related to BitTorrent and other P2P technologies that are out there today, company co-founder and CEO Pablo Hesse stressed.

“This is a technology for cable operators and traditional broadcasters to help them to distribute streams over the internet,” and do so without buffering or other types of technical interruptions, he said.

While most of today’s streaming platforms try to answer the scaling issue by deploying more servers and infrastructure, Teltoo’s P2P system strives for higher levels of availability and stability by allowing users to share bandwidth.

Under its architecture, Teltoo implements a small piece of JavaScript on its partner’s streaming video player for everything from laptops, to mobile devices and even set-top boxes. In tandem, those players are connected using WebRTC, an open Internet standard that supports real-time communication and can run on HTML5, making it agnostic for the viewer and eliminating the need for separate plug-ins. Behind that is a server that represents the “brain” of the solution and manages the connections while a live stream is being delivered.

Teltoo is also designed to be agnostic in other ways, Hesse said, as it can support various encoders and digital rights management systems and products.

The result, the company claims, can help its partners offload of as much as 83% of bandwidth for those streams. In practice, that kind of number, of course, could be of keen interest to cable operators as well as programmers that are delivering more and more of their content over-the-top.

In fact, Teltoo’s approach is already getting some traction, as the startup is doing some work with Liberty Global as well as RTVE, Spain’s state broadcaster.

More recently, Teltoo, a company with founders who came from such companies as HP and NDS, was one of four startups selected by UpRamp’s “Fiterator” program. That initiative, run by the CableLabs-backed accelerator, enables its picks to get valuable exposure with cable operators alongside guaranteed commercial deals. In exchange, UpRamp gets a small equity stake (usually in the form of warrants) in the startups picked for the program.

Before it was recruited for the UpRamp program, Teltoo and its team went through the Virgin Media Accelerator held in London last year.

“We think there’s a real opportunity with TV everywhere and over-the-top [video] across our 60-odd members right now,” Scott Brown, UpRamp’s executive director, said.

Teltoo’s technology and product set “has gotten to the point that it’s applicable to the rest of the industry,” Brown added.

Brown also acknowledges that P2P typically has been a “third-rail conversation” with cable operators because of the asynchronous nature of their bandwidth (most deliver much more downstream capacity than upstream capacity).

“The reason why we think Teltoo has an advantage and opportunity to succeed in the cable space is the network management layer that they bring to this, where the MSO can actually control the level and quality and amount of up-bound bandwidth that’s used in this managed P2P.”

Bandwidth management specialist Sandvine Corp. said it has entered a deal to be acquired by PNI Canada Acquireco Corp., an affiliate of Francisco Partners and Procera Networks.

As a result, Sandvine will also be merged with Procera Networks, a bandwidth management/network intelligence firm owned by Francisco Partners.

Under the deal, PNI will pay C$4.40 per share, implying an aggregate fully-diluted equity value for Sandvine of about C$562 million.

That beat out an earlier bid of C$3.80 per share from Vector Capital affiliate Scalar AcquireCo Corp. that was announced in May. The cash purchase price also represents a 40% premium to Sandvine's closing share price of C$3.15 on May 25, and a 64% premium to the cash-adjusted closing price on May 25.

RELATED: Sandvine Gets Bigger Bid

Sandvine said a special meeting of shareholders scheduled for July 18 has been postponed and a meeting to consider the PNI proposal will be held at a date to be determined by Sandvine’s board.

The termination fee payable to PNI, in certain circumstances, is C$16.9 million.

Waterloo, Ontario-based Sandvine said the combined company will be led by Procera CEO Lyndon Cantor and Procera CFO  Richard Deggs, and retain the Sandvine name.

Sandvine, whose network policy control solutions are deployed in more than 300 networks in over 100 countries, is also known for publishing its Global Internet Phenomena studies.

RELATED: In-Home Traffic Via Smartphones, Tablets Catching Up to PCs: Study

“Sandvine has done a tremendous job becoming a leader in its market,” Cantor said in a statement. “Along with the rest of the Procera team, we look forward to bringing the best of both companies together to accelerate our strategy as the preeminent provider in the emerging Network Intelligence market.”

“This is a very exciting next step for Sandvine and Procera. As technologies and networks continue to evolve, I firmly believe that the combination of Sandvine and Procera creates the premier provider in our markets — with the scale and innovation needed to address our customers’ opportunities to build more intelligent networks,” added Dave Caputo, Sandvine’s president and CEO, who will join the board of the combined company as non-executive chairman.

While broadband speed has been increasing so too have the bandwidth needs of the biggest OTT video services. Luckily the biggest consumer, Netflix, is ready to reduce its need, though it is shocking the company hasn’t addressed this before.

According to the latest State of the Internet report from Akamai, ISPs in both the US and UK have been hard at work improving the speeds of their broadband networks. Between Q3 2014 and Q3 2015, U.S. ISPs have boosted average speed 10% to 12.6 Mbps, and average peak speed has increased 17% to 57.3Mbps. The U.S. has also improved the reach of faster broadband. The number of people able to access connections at or above 15 Mbps increased to 24%, up from 19% one year earlier.

The UK has done even better than the U.S. Average broadband speed topped the U.S., reaching 13 Mbps, up 21% from one year earlier. However, the average peak speed still lags the U.S. slightly, at 54.2 Mbps. The UK has done a better job boosting the number of people with faster broadband -- 28% of UK broadband connections can now achieve speeds of 15 Mbps or above, up from 20% last year.

As broadband providers improve their networks, OTT video providers are increasing the demands they place on them. Sandvine says that the top four online video providers all increased their overall share of downstream bandwidth in the last year.* Leading the charge was, of course, Netflix. The company grew its overall share of downstream U.S. bandwidth from 34.9% to 37.1%. YouTube, the second biggest consumer of downstream bandwidth, also boosted its share over the last year, growing from 14% to 17.9%.

Hulu and Amazon both increased their share of downstream bandwidth, though they are consuming less than a tenth as much as Netflix. Hulu grew its share from 1.4% to 2.5%, and Amazon grew a smaller amount, from 2.6% to 3.1%.

Given the amount of bandwidth it consumes, I’m sure ISPs are very happy that Netflix has announced it will be moving to a new encoding scheme in the New Year. It could reduce the overall bandwidth it uses by 20% or more, and reduce the speed of broadband required to deliver a good quality picture. However, ISPs are probably less than pleased at how Netflix is currently encoding content.

Netflix admitted that when it streams a cartoon in HD and an action movie in HD it consumes the same amount of downstream bandwidth for each. These two video types are vastly different.

Cartoons can be compressed a lot because colors tend to be uniform, characters typically are not in constant motion, and the picture lacks a lot of detail (like skin pores, individual blades of grass, etc.) Action movies are the exact inverse of this, with lots of motion, color tones and details.

This means there is a lot of data required to represent an action movie accurately, and not a lot required for a cartoon. A cartoon in 1080p resolution can be streamed at 1.5 Mbps in the new Netflix encoding scheme, versus four times that using the old. The lackadaisical approach to encoding that Netflix has been using is part of the reason ISPs keep having to boost broadband speed to the home!

I can only hope that Hulu, YouTube and Amazon are less wasteful than Netflix when they stream their video.

Why it matters

ISPs are improving their networks to boost broadband speed and reach partly to keep pace with the growth in OTT video consumption.

At the same time, OTT video service providers are increasing their needs from those broadband connections.

OTT video service providers would consume a lot less broadband resources if they adopted a saner approach to encoding their videos.

*Downstream bandwidth is the capacity of a connection to receive data. Upstream bandwidth is the capacity of a connection to transmit data.

-Colin Dixon is founder and chief analyst of nScreenMedia. This post was republished with permission from the author.