Arbor Networks

Arbor's products and services enable cable operators to optimize their network infrastructure, reduce or defer costs and deliver new, profitable and secure services in order to retain existing and attract new customers.

Pervasive network visibility, intelligent traffic engineering, and secure services help cable operators thrive

The days of simply delivering quality television to residential subscribers are long gone. In order to survive in today’s highly competitive digital world, cable operators continue to expand their services, which now include the likes of HDTV, high speed Internet access, digital voice, security, music, gaming or services designed for the SMB market.This evolution is fraught with many challenges, some of which are:

• Bandwidth Consumption – The proliferation of video and other multi-media applications has caused a significant increase in the amount of bandwidth that is being consumed on broadband networks. This rise in bandwidth demand has hindered the ability to deliver a quality user experience despite technologies such as DOCSIS 2.0. Many times a majority of the bandwidth is consumed by a minority of users which may require implementation of fair network usage policies. Gaining visibility into what or who is consuming your bandwidth is a fundamental requirement in order to conduct intelligent network engineering, reduce costs, and maximize current network infrastructure.
• Increased competition – Whether it’s from DSL, wireless or other telecommunications companies, competition abounds. In order to attract and retain existing customers, cable operators are feverishly building out new infrastructure to support triple and/or quad play services. But these services are threatened by Over The Top (OTT) applications from the likes of YouTube, Skype, etc. without any financial gain from the cable operator.
• Profitability Pressures – As budgets get slashed and the trend moves away from flat rate pricing, cable operators must maximize their current investments in network infrastructure, human resources and tools to reduce or defer costs and deliver new, profitable services - all with the ultimate goal of increasing overall profitability and ARPU.
• Security and Availability – As the trend towards network convergence continues, once separate services such as voice, video and data are now susceptible to network based threats such as DDoS attacks and application layer attacks. Securing and maintaining these business critical services is required in order to meet SLAs, reduce costs and avoid customer churn.

Overcoming these challenges requires a solution that allows cable operators to optimize their network infrastructure, reduce or defer costs and deliver new, profitable and secure services in order to retain existing and attract new customers.

• Pervasive and deep visibility into network, application and subscriber traffic.
• Automated network anomaly, DDoS and application layer threat protection.
• Intelligent traffic engineering via robust peering or routing analysis and bandwidth management.
• A platform for delivery of security and new services such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack protection and quota & tiered billing services.

Arbor Networks' Secure Service Control solution for cable operator networks consists of two main product families: Arbor Peakflow and Arbor eSeries.

The Arbor Peakflow family consists of the Peakflow SP and Peakflow X products that provide network-wide security and traffic monitoring. The Peakflow products offer the following features and benefits:

• Leveraging IP flow technology already embedded in the cable operator's infrastructure, Peakflow enables cost effective, pervasive network visibility and security from the peering edge, through the backbone and clear to the customer aggregation edge of the cable operator’s network.
• Comprehensive threat management to proactively detect, analyze and classify network-wide anomalies such as DDoS attacks, botnets, worms and other threats that may impact the network infrastructure or triple/quad play services.
• Surgical mitigation of network and application layer threats without impacting legitimate traffic and business services using Peakflow SP Threat Management System (TMS) devices.
• Increased availability by gaining a clear, network-wide view of operational issues, such as traffic and routing instability that can reduce uptime and quality of service.
• Improved traffic engineering (i.e., peering analysis) and capacity planning to increase the performance and lower the cost of network infrastructures.
• Increase profitability by delivering next-generation in-cloud managed services such as DDoS detection/mitigation.

The Arbor eSeries family consists of the e100 platform for broadband service optimization. The eSeries solutions provide the following features and benefits:

• Industry-leading deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, enabling insight into application and subscriber traffic.
• Integrated suite of Service Logic Software (SLS) options for reporting, subscriber management, API writing and traffic monitoring including VoIP traffic. These SLS options provide the network visibility needed for effective analytics and reporting, bandwidth management, service plan management and quota management.
• Scalable, carrier-class design handles the traffic and demands of today’s largest broadband provider networks, scales 1 to 20 Gbps and up to 500,000 subscribers per platform.
• Centralized management and reporting to ensure an efficient approach to network management and reporting, even when scaling to hundreds of platforms and millions of users.
• In-line/full-line rate deployment options, allowing cable operators to manage bandwidth in accordance with network usage policies or application types (such as HTTP, P2P and video).
• Identify applications within applications, such as streaming video, VoIP and gaming applications within a Web (HTTP) download. As a result, gain insight into the subscriber and application usage needed to develop more effective marketing programs and services based on actual traffic patterns.
• DHCP integration to support IP address resolution to external authentication systems including Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP).