June 3, 2007

Oversi Makes U.S. Debut

By Mike Robuck

Oversi made its public debut in the United States at last month's NCTA show in Las Vegas. Prior to that show, Israel-based Oversi's only foray in the United States was a demonstration at one of CableLabs' conferences.

Oversi's OverCache solution is designed to offload the peer-to-peer traffic that can clog up a cable operator's interconnect links. The asymmetrical nature of cable networks can lead to network bottlenecks with heavy peer-to-peer traffic, according to Eitan Efron, Oversi's vice president of marketing and business developments. Peer-to-peer applications such as videos generate large amounts of symmetrical traffic and can consume the uplink capacity of cable networks and can also reduce service levels.

Service providers can compress video to meet the demand, but that can affect the quality, and adding more equipment, such as cable modem termination systems (CMTSs) or a backbone upgrade, can be costly.

"Our caching solution acts like a water tower to the headend, or in a data center," Efron said. "It connects to a router port and learns the network, based on grid computing, as it becomes part of the peer-to-peer network. It relieves pressure on the interconnects because a user doesn't need to go outside for content because the most popular content is stored (by OverCache)."

With a 95 percent byte hit ratio, OverCache delivers users' peer-to-peer traffic while using 5 percent of the bandwidth from international connections. From the revenue side, service providers can offer extra bandwidth for premium customers for additional rates without incurring any additional costs. The solution also allows service providers to set up their own content delivery networks if they choose to.

Efron said one rack unit typically serves a medium-sized service provider, but it can scale up with additional blades as the peer-to-peer traffic grows.

"The statistics are better for Tier 1 and Tier 2 providers," he said.

The OverCache system has been vetted against U.S. copyright laws and European Union directives. It has 20 deployments worldwide and is in trial with several large U.S. operators.

- Mike Robuck