Sandvine

Sandvine was established in 2001 in Waterloo, Canada by ex-employees of PixStream that used to work in the field of developing video solutions before it was shutdown after being acquired by Cicico. The last is one of the biggest international pioneer companies in IT and networks. In the beginning, Sandvine focused on products related to broadband networks management and lowering operation costs.

After a few years of merges and acquiring by several tech companies, both Sandvine and Procera Networks merged under the name Sandvine. Procera Networks was established in California, USA in 2002. In 2006 it merged with Netintact, a company based in Varberg, Sweden. It used to offer products for Spectrum management for Scandinavian networks operators. Sandvine had two offices for R&D operations, in India and in Israel. In 2013, Sandvine shutdown its office in Israel, which it ran after acquiring the Israeli Cavlematrix Technologies. It moved its R&D operations to its offices in India and Canada. In 2015 Francisco Partners acquired Procera, this was before both Francisco Partners and Procera acquired Sandvine in 2017 through PNI Acquireco Corp owned by Francisco Partners. Since then the name of Sandvine emerged as one of the companies producing and operating surveillance and Internet censorship devices.Sandvine runs its operations in more than 50 countries some of them are Middle Eastern and North African countries.

In March 2018, The Citizen Lap published a report titled “Traffic Crisis” that revealed the use of Sandvine Pocket Logic devices in Egypt, which were used for redirecting the users of many ISPs to ads and scripts for mining digital currencies. On September 21st, 2020, Qurium released a report about the use of Sandvine for blocking Al Manassa, an independent Egyptian journalism website.

Companies using software or equipment in MENA

Technical Specifications of Software and Equipment

Sandvine PacketLogic devices are of the equipment Sandvine produce. Governments, CSPs, and ISPs use them for Deep Packed Inspection (DPI) operations that allow them to monitor the Internet, block websites, manipulate users’ communications, real-time monitor network traffic, and filter network traffic including blocking websites, applications, and protocols (like P2P). Sandvine PacketLogic devices are also capable of prioritizing, analyzing, injecting, and recording different types of Internet traffic. Blocking websites by Sandvine devices is accomplished by injecting TCP reset packets.