Cisco Systems Inc. becomes the latest company to try its hand on mobile data traffic management with its planned acquisition of Denver-based BroadHop Inc., a provider of policy control and service management technology for carrier networks.
“With global IP traffic projected to increase threefold over the next five years –after having increased eight-fold over the past five years – policy control and service creation at large scale has never been more vital for mobile and fixed communications service providers,” said Cisco in a statement yesterday. “Cisco plans to add a critical piece of service creation technology to its portfolio today by announcing its intent to acquire BroadHop.”
BroadHop’s policy control systems for mobile and fixed networks will be integrated to Cisco’s Service Provider Mobility Group, the company said.
BroadHop’s traffic management and policy servers are deployed in more than 70 wireline and mobile carrier networks around the world. The technology provides carriers the flexibility to create service tiers based on bandwidth or applications. For instance, carriers could then offer users policies that provide users a speed boost for an additional fee.
The technology can also be used to downgrade a user’s bandwidth such as when carriers throttle online traffic.
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BroadHop has been a key service provider Wi-Fi partner for Cisco and the acquisition is a “natural extension” of this collaboration, the company said.
The BoradHop team will be integrated into Cisco’s Service Provider Network Group and will report to Shailesh Shukla, vice-president and general manager of the company’s software and applications group.