Fully Virtualized Bandwidth Management and DDoS Mitigation Provide Service Assurance and QoE
About AMTEL-SVYAZ
Amtel-Svyaz, ZAO provides a full range of VSAT satellite-based communications services to business-to-government, business-to-operator, business-to-business, and business-to-consumer market segments. The company is based in Moscow, Russia and was established in 2004 to provide satellite services for all of Russia, from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka. To date, Amtel has successfully implemented over 90 federal projects and has a wide and fast-growing customer base. The company continuously invests in new solutions and technologies to ensure high customer satisfaction and attract new customers.
Challenge
Prior to implementing the Allot solution, the company was aware of internet quality degradation issues that were impacting customers. The causes of the degradation were identified as a combination of DDoS attack traffic and heavy bandwidth consumers such as P2P traffic, TCP-spoofing sessions and other bandwidth hogging “stormy users” like Microsoft updates. Together, around 30% of the available bandwidth was being hijacked. Attempts were made to solve the problem by using WD-WAN and SCPC channel optimization solutions, but they only helped partially resolve the TCP-spoofing issue. P2P and DDoS traffic continued to harm network QoS and user QoE.
Solution
Amtel was determined to find a comprehensive, flexible and cost-effective solution. They spent six months testing and comparing various international and local DPI-based alternatives. Major comparison criteria were: scalability, cost, accuracy of protocol/ application detection, security, stability and manageability/operation.
Allot’s solution combines application aware traffic control, DDoS protection and Bot containment to prevent bandwidth abuse by P2P applications, block DDoS attacks on Amtel’s infrastructure and thwart outbound Botnet abuse. Allot subscriber awareness enabled effective per-subscriber traffic management, which contained outbound DDoS and Botnet abusive behavior for every user in the network, saving uplink bandwidth.
Based on rigorous functionality testing, Mr. Igor Ilinchik (First Deputy CEO, AMTEL-SVYAZ) selected the Allot Service Gateway and DDoS Secure in their fully virtualized mode on COTS hardware. In addition to superior performance, choosing the virtual mode further reduced implementation costs and the overall TCO for the project. An additional factor in the decision was the high-quality response that Allot’s professional services demonstrated by their timely resolution of Amtel’s initial and ongoing requirements for a successful POC. The fact that Allot’s multi-service gateway also supports regulatory compliance and subscriber management integration for advanced policy control and charging, enhanced the solution fit for Amtel.
Benefits
By activating Allot Traffic Management and DDoS Protection functionality on a virtualized implementation of the Allot Service Gateway multiservice platform, the Russian VSAT service
provider can:
- Protect service availability and quality by blocking both inbound and outbound DDoS attacks and preventing unbalanced bandwidth consumption
- Capacity has increase by approximately 30% across VSAT hubs
- Satellite resource savings of ~15% are anticipated
- ROI is expected within 3-7 months
- Gain full visibility of DDoS attacks, and valuable threat intelligence that was previously unavailable
- Enhance customer satisfaction with improved video streaming quality has improved and YouTube traffic is up
- Meet regulatory compliance requirements through WebSafe functionality
- Save time and expense by implementing a fully virtualized solution
A final, anticipated benefit is Amtel’s plan to increase integration of Allot’s Subscriber Management Platform with their billing systems to create and enforce even more effective customer offers. This integration is expected to increase Amtel’s revenues and customer satisfaction.
