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Jul 9 2009   1:14PM GMT

Operators look to more effective traffic analysis and management



Posted by: Tom Nolle
DPI, 4G, 3G, traffic management, femtocells, IMS

O2 has been deploying DPI for traffic analysis (and possibly management) in its upgraded 7 Mbps upgrade to 3G, and some of the information the company has gained could have a significant impact on 3G/4G planning worldwide.

The company found, not surprisingly, that 5% of users consumed 80% of bandwidth. This skewing of the old 80-20 rule is one of the primary reasons why operators say that some form of traffic management is essential to insure that the broad population gets good service at a fair price. The data also shows that most usage is in the evening and at home, however, which means that femtocells would offload considerable traffic were they widely deployed.

Many operators tell us that while 3G femtocells are possible, the application of IMS and 4G would make it far easier, particularly if self-organizing principles were applied to cell setup. How valuable all this intelligence will be may depend on regulatory trends, though; many countries are seeing considerable public advocacy pressure against traffic management.

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Jan 27 2009   2:55PM GMT

DPI: Use it, but don’t use it



Posted by: Tom Nolle
Deep Packet Inspection, DPI, telecom service providers, equipment vendors, applications

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.

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Sep 26 2008   2:32PM GMT

Using DPI: Behavioral targeting and privacy



Posted by: Tom Nolle
AT&T, Verizon, DPI

AT&T and Verizon have pledged not to track online users for behavioral targeting unless the user opts in, a move that we believe is being taken to help position both companies for later use of DPI for more direct user surveillance.

In fact, without DPI it is difficult for someone other than a portal player to track users at all. Network operators like AT&T and Verizon, like other operators worldwide, have been either considering or actually trialing technology to sniff packet streams to determine what sites a user is visiting.

Congressional hearings in the U.S., FCC comments, and EU regulatory trends all seem to be favoring DPI regulation of DPI to obtain user data, and in both cases, the “at the minimum, opt-in” position has been proposed by regulators. The current move is thus a step toward linking opt-in with “tracking”, not as much to justify current tracking but to pre-justify a later decision to use DPI. We don’t think it will be that simple. The FCC tells us that without permission of both websites and users it might well be illegal to snoop broadband Internet traffic.

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