Sambal™

Mobile broadband customer growth continues apace. Ever growing numbers of people rely on it for a large part of their internet experience through smartphones and laptop modems. It is unfortunate that all this relies on a protocol designed for fixed line networks, and which is uniquely ill designed to deal gracefully with the vagaries of radio network delays and packet losses.

TCP/IP itself is the invisible culprit behind a large proportion of customer dissatisfaction with mobile broadband. Its mechanisms were designed long ago for simple fixed networks and it has been pushed far beyond its original brief.

Web servers out on the internet have no idea what kind of access network sits between them and the client. The result is that they must interpret any packet loss or variable delay as the worst possible case of core internet meltdown, and back off sending speed dramatically.

Teclo Networks Sambal™ is a node that sits at the edge of the mobile broadband network where it can run TCP/IP algorithms that are carefully tuned to react in a manner that is optimal for a lossy radio network, while still using vanilla algorithms towards the internet.

Dramatic improvements in speed and consistency

Sambal™ has been measured to achieve 30% speedups in typical mobile broadband networks. This is achieved solely by optimising TCP/IP behaviour to make it operate much more effectively towards a lossy and high latency radio network.

Cost savings

Building a radio access network that suffers no packet losses and reaches the level of coverage perfection required to ensure that TCP/IP always works optimally would be fantastically expensive. A Sambal™ node in the network has the additional benefit that it can make up for coverage thinness and hence deliver significant cost savings.

In 3G networks subscriber access to cells is often limited by the number of Dedicated Channels provisioned in the node Bs. By delivering content more quickly, and releasing channels sooner, more subscribers can make use of the existing network resources.

No special client software

The TCP/IP implementation in Sambal™ requires no changes to the client software. It interworks perfectly with the standard TCP/IP networking stacks included in mobile broadband clients.