DPI: Use it, but don’t use it

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) continues to be a contentious topic, and service providers are so leery of regulatory intervention that they avoid words with any of those letters in them.

They’ve told us to ask vendors not to use the term—they prefer “application-specific routing” or something similar. There are in fact a lot of valid applications of DPI, such as the XO model where it is used to monitor application performance.

But DPI is like firearms or interrogation or a lot of other stuff that has valid uses and egregious misuses, and it is typecast by the latter. We’ve not seen much interest in rehabbing the concept by renaming it, but operators have made their positions very clear, and we think there’s some indication that vendors are catching on. If that’s the case, then “xxx” might be a really hot concept in 2009.