Applied Broadband has updated its DOCSIS network analysis tools with an enhanced Universal IP Detail Record (IPDR) Engine and two new applications, one that measures subscriber bandwidth consumption and another that aids analysis of subscriber data with visualization tools.  

Applied Broadband’s Pipeline broadband intelligence product suite gives cable operators the ability to extract historical and real-time intelligence from their networks to address metered billing, bandwidth management, subscriber policy enforcement and other business objectives.

“Even as DOCSIS 3.0 equipment proliferates across networks and delivers increased bandwidth options to consumers, the challenge of identifying and managing consumption across multiple services without stoking the regulatory concerns of approaches that use deep packet inspection continues to be a significant challenge for operators,” said Jason Schnitzer, founder and principal of Applied Broadband.

“IPDR provides the ideal solution to manage bandwidth capacity and service usage with a standards-based approach to accurately tracking consumption in an application-agnostic way,” Schnitzer continued.

The enhancements the company made to its Pipeline IPDR Engine include the ability to handle all advanced service definitions and IPDR requirements in the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, using semantic routing to send IPDR streams from one CMTS to multiple network and service management applications, and real-time stream processing to eliminate delays from batch processing.

The first new application is called Pipeline Meter; it is a real-time bandwidth conservation and subscriber consumption management tool that measures, detects and reports usage and usage policy violations using actual network and service data.

The second, called Pipeline Analytics, is a new visualization environment for interpreting broadband intelligence information from DOCSIS 3.0 services, networks and subscribers using dashboards driven by key performance indicators (KPIs).

In addition to the new applications, Applied Broadband also offers Pipeline Emulator, a modeling and simulation environment of DOCSIS 3.0 networks and IPDR record streams for forecasting capacity and usage behaviors for new services, as well as for load testing new IPDR-based applications and back office systems such as rating and billing.

Applied Broadband said it has licensed Pipeline technology to seven customers, and the software is used by five of the top-10 cable operators in North America. Based on these deployments, Pipeline is now the IPDR collection layer for more than 4,000 CMTS devices worldwide, representing millions of high-speed data, video and voice customers.