BitTorrent Throttling Company Sandvine Sees Sales Down 88%
Written by enigmax on March 07, 2008Sandvine, manufacturers of BitTorrent throttling technology has seen its first quarter sales drop 88% in a year. After achieving 42,000% growth in 5 years, the company - best known for providing the technology which put Comcast into the spotlight recently - has seen its value plummet 42% in a single day.
When Comcast introduced the Sandvine traffic shaping solution, it hoped it could quietly interfere with its customer’s BitTorrent activities without getting too much attention. Unfortunately for them, their actions didn’t go unnoticed, and during August last year we broke the news that this ISP does indeed mess with it’s customers internet connections.
Since then, things have gone from bad to worse for Comcast, as their customers started to realize that this ISP wasn’t giving them what they paid for. As a result, Comcast are now being sued and annoyed users formed a coalition to challenge the company to try to claim compensation. All of this is on top of a FCC hearing which deemed that Comcast uses ‘hacker-techniques’ to interrupt BitTorrent traffic, techniques which are employed via the traffic management ’solution’ from Sandvine. Essentially, the Sandvine system allows Comcast to inject forged reset packets into BitTorrent transfers which makes seeding impossible - good news for ISPs who don’t want to give their customers the bandwidth they paid for, but bad news for BitTorrent, and even worse news for supporters of Internet neutrality.
However, it is the very fact that Sandvine allows ISPs like Comcast to disrupt their customer’s activities which prompted the recent Federal Communications Commission hearings. The FCC warned Comcast that it will not allow it to disrupt internet traffic, which is of course a major concern for other ISPs considering investing in the Sandvine system. According to a G&M report, it is this hesitancy over net neutrality issues, coupled with problems major telecoms companies are experiencing when trying to refinance their debts, that have hit Sandvine hard. A survey by financial services outfit Canaccord Adams suggest that the top 40 global communications companies are all currently extremely wary over capital expenditure.
After achieving astronomical growth of 42,000% in just 5 years, Sandvine is really feeling the pressure as on the Toronto Stock Exchange its stock fell a massive 42%, to a low of $1.55. The company already predicted lower performance and revised its revenue estimates back in December 2007. Unfortunately these predictions were still too optimistic as the company has announced that the actual revenue this year is likely to be a further 20% lower than the revised figures. Sales for the first quarter will be $8.2m, an 88% drop on the previous year while full year revenue is expected to be around $80m, down from the December 2007 prediction of $110m.
All this adds up to an annual growth of 15%, versus last year’s growth of 132%.
At best, that means annual growth of just 15 per cent, compared with 132 per cent a year earlier.
Dave Caputo, Sandvine’s President and Chief Executive Officer said in a statement: “We believe that the delays have come about for a variety of reasons, ranging from unique customer-specific circumstances to economic conditions, making operators pause before executing on their approved budgets. We can’t dictate when customers make their decisions, just influence whether they choose Sandvine - and we remain as confident as ever in our ability to do that.”
With BitTorrent developers hard at work creating Sandvine-busting code, time will tell if Mr Caputo’s confidence continues into 2009.
Previously: Dutch University Uses BitTorrent to Update Workstations
Next: Lessig Questions Pirate Party’s Existence
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Can’t wait for that “Sandvine busting code.”
Bittorrent Throttling Technology? Cisco has traffic shaping capabilities on some of their routers, FFS. It depends on how you configure the thing. That title is way exaggerated in my opinion. Sandvine provides solutions to implement network policies, like antispam filters, not just traffic shapers.
Traffic shaping isn’t bad, corporations had it for ages. It’s when a large greedy company uses it to NOT give customers what they paid for.
Arr Starve em to death,The sharks wont even want em,raise the sails full ramming speed………………..
The more savvy torrent heads out there could all buy stock in the morning, the all pull out at a given time to cause a downward spiral of negative speculation. That’ll hurt then.
[quote comment="305740"]
Traffic shaping isn’t bad, corporations had it for ages. It’s when a large greedy company uses it to NOT give customers what they paid for.[/quote]
And Sandvine is an innocent party in all of this? Give me a fucking break, you little tool.
If Sandvine didn’t offer Bittorrent throttling using forged RST packets in the first place, then large greedy companies couldn’t use that service to screw over their customers.
I detect the aroma of COCK in your breath.
As for Sandvine… That’s one more shrimp on the barbie. Have fun sizzling right next to MediaDefender and the rest of its sleazy ilk; That’s your fate for joining the war to end filesharing, a goal which is truly synonymous with the word “futile”.
If Sandvine only survives on traffic shaping like comcast uses, then fuck em, if they actually do anything good, they will survive.
Anything that stands in bittorrents way will be crushed.
shiver ma timbers
where i am in toronto ontario, bell sympatico throttles p2p activities calling me an excessive bandwith user the thing is though ive paid for 60gb a month at super high speed and ive never gone over that limit so how am i excessive?
multiple attempts to get a refund for unused bandwith that i couldn’t use because of bell’s interference has resulted in nothing as no one appears to know that bell uses network management techniques to block p2p activities. i hate bell but rogers is worse and we’re locked in a bell bundle…
another one bites the dust…
That will teach those pigs…
die sandfaggots.
hahaha I sold 218K shares of this dud back in November, I’m VERY happy to be out. I lost money on the investment (I bought higher last April) but not much and had I waited to sell my goose would have been cooked.
I’ve got two clients still in for about 165K shares as of last week, I’ve already been telling them it’s time to sell. Maybe they did and that’s what caused the drop… lots of guys are heading for the exits after the last report.
Hard to believe this stock ever made it off the venture exchange.
Serves them right, hope they go broke.
=quote=The FCC warned Comcast that it will not allow it to disrupt internet traffic, which is of course a major concern for other ISPs considering investing in the Sandvine system. According to a G&M report, it is this hesitancy over net neutrality issues, coupled with problems major telecoms companies are experiencing when trying to refinance their debts, that have hit Sandvine hard.=endquote=
The above phrases should not go unappreciated. When Comcast declared war on P2P — as many others had before — it had an unexpected result. If anyone successfully figured it out, at worst they expected the anger of a bunch of freeloaders (those trading in muzic, moviez and warez they shouldn’t share anyway). The FREE in freeloaders is the same as FREE found in FREE BEER — to use the apt analogy established by some in the Open Source community.
Instead, they drew a more powerful opponent force: those who support and defend freedom. In this case FREE referred to motherhood issues such as a FREE PRESS, FREE SPEECH, and a FREE PEOPLE with their own rights to an ever-growing sea of innovation, knowledge, and artistic expression.
The very inventors and pioneers of the Internet to staunch defenders of an independent press and open governments mounted a rigorous, uncoordinated, but simultaneous attack that blew the hidden Sandvine technology out of its forgery-protected husk and into the light of day for all to ponder. It’s discriminatory nature now available for all to see.
Back to Enigmax’s article, the Sandvine technology’s attraction is to save money. Telecoms (CATV MSOs in this case) can and will spend money — the question is, will they spend it on upgrades to meet consumer demand, or will they spend it on devices to secretly shape customer demand to their own will.
Since the Grass-roots forces of freedom dismantled the money-saving power of the Sandvine product, Telecoms find themselves having to rewrite their plans for 2008. Thus the Network Neutrality debate and Telecom buying factors mentioned above are inextricably linked together in a deadly Perfect Storm for Sandvine.
Robb Topolski
wow, 42000%… Wish I had invested in that.
Rogers Internet Sucks. Wouldnt be suprised if they use them aswell..
Spammer, no one knows or cares what that is.
Where this differs from the router approach is that it actually hacks the packets you are transmitting giving false information to the destination. It isn’t simply closing the bottleneck of your upstream bandwidth that is using the bit torrent protocol. So you CAN NOT com[pare this to traffic shaping policies of corporations. Like comparing apples to homosexuals - both are fruits but one leaves a much different taste in your mouth than the other.
Stuff ‘em. They serve no purpose to the internet community or the community in general.
It’s about time companies realise the power of the people. Don’t screw people over.
Sandvine sells a product that can be used to mitigate the effects of congestion on an overloaded network. If Sandvine and the other half-a-dozen companies that sell traffic management products go out of business, or their products are made illegal, network congestion will not magically go away. Maybe ISP’s will fix the congestion by expanding their networks; but do you really think they’ll do it for free?
Sandvine sounds particularly nasty, so I’m glad to hear they are going down, but while they suffer, a rival will benefit. Maybe we’ll end up with many ISPs that block all P2P connections, in which case the ones that allow them will gain new subscribers. It all depends on how profit is maximised by the ISPs. Many people not using P2P would probably pay higher subscription fees for guaranteed speed, but P2P fans might find themselves paying huge amounts for truly “unlimited” and unthrottled bandwidth. The ISPs will use whatever legal means necessary to keep their profits high and shareholders happy. If we want more freedom, we’ll have to pay for it. We don’t get motorways without paying for them, do we?
I’m not really that bothered, as my own ISP (which has been throttling my connection for a couple of months) has just told me they are closing my account. I’ll do my filesharing via snail mail from now on. The post office lets me send as many packets as I like… :)
Why the heck are you with Bell Canada? Switch to a decent ISP like MyCybernet or something.
There’s only two ISPs in Canada: the cable company (usually Rogers) and the phone company (usually Bell). Anybody else who is trying to sell you internet service is probably a reseller of one of those two services (the CRTC mandates that they resell their service to others). Don’t expect to get better service by switching.
FUCK U SANDVINE, you deserve to go banckrupt
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