Cisco Intend to Acquire UK Internet Testing Firm SamKnows UPDATE

The UK internet connection testing firm SamKnows, which supplies services that are used by both major broadband ISPs and Ofcom to help measure network performance, has announced that they’re to be acquired by global networking giant Cisco and will be joining their ThousandEyes team to integrate their technology.

The name SamKnows is a familiar one around these parts. A number of ISPs have integrated the company’s software into their broadband routers and mobile devices to help measure and monitor connectivity, while others have deployed customised router kit to achieve a similar outcome. Ofcom’s study of Home Broadband speeds (here) also made use of their tech, although the regulator plans to stop publishing those after the next report (here).

In recent years, the company has expanded beyond the UK and now works with network providers and governments across various other countries. Suffice to say that this has caught the eye of Cisco and their ThousandEyes team, which analyses global internet health (check out their ‘Internet Outages Map‘).

Alex Salter, CEO of SamKnows, said:

“We believe that in a few years, every internet enabled device will include a measurement agent, collecting data about internet performance. We already have tens of million homes actively testing using our global platform. We expect this number to grow tenfold in the coming years. This month alone we’ve added almost four million homes and with the performance data we collect, we are building a never-before-seen picture of device, application and network performance. But there is still so much more that could be done.

Specifically, we’ll be joining the Cisco ThousandEyes team to integrate our technologies and take ThousandEyes’ view of global internet health to the next level. Cisco ThousandEyes empowers leading organizations worldwide to see, understand, and improve connected experiences everywhere, and joining an organization like Cisco will enable us to scale to reach more devices and assure great digital experiences for any user over any network.”

Jonathan Davidson, Cisco’s EVP and General Manager, said:

“Cisco’s intent to acquire SamKnows, a privately held broadband network monitoring company headquartered in London, England, will expand ThousandEyes’ industry-leading view of global internet health. Today, ThousandEyes has hundreds of thousands of vantage points across the Internet, in enterprise environments, and on user devices.

With the addition of SamKnows’ millions of vantage points into the last mile, customers now have a single source of truth for how the Internet is performing across their entire infrastructure, including home and mobile device networks. Whether for hybrid work or consumer application delivery, optimizing and improving internet performance for everyone is just a click away.”

At this stage it’s unclear what this might mean for all of SamKnows’ existing clients, but the acquisition itself is expected to close during the first quarter of Cisco’s Full Year 2024.

UPDATE 13th Sept 2023

Cisco has confirmed the completion of their acquisition.