Cox turns to Arbor to help beef up its Internet backbone

Cox Communications this week said it has deployed Arbor Networks' Peakflow SP traffic module to better manage traffic usage, especially between peers.

Cox required a tool that would allow the service provider to engineer its network architecture and plan for future bandwidth needs, says Randy Kinsey, manager of network engineering and architecture at Cox.

The company had been using a tool from another vendor to help achieve this goal but it wasn’t meeting Cox’s needs. The service provider would not say which vendor has been displaced by Arbor.

 “[The other vendor’s product] only showed us traffic flow in and out of our network,” Kinsey says. “We wanted to see where that traffic was going inside our network and internal flows in our network.”

Kinsey says now that Cox has had Arbor's product up and running, he has found additional network data that’s helpful in determining current and future needs.

Cox has already been using  Arbor's Peakflow SP DoS module for some two years. The tool helps the service provider protect its network from denial of service attacks. Now Cox is able to use a single platform to address both its anti-DoS and traffic analysis needs.

Cox says it has 14 “major” points-of-presence and six regional data centers across its nationwide network that supports more than 2 million broadband users.