Suddenly it all happens at once. We went from zero to two events focused on DPI in one week – Light Reading’s virtual tradeshow Policy Control & Deep Packet Inspection, and Informa’s Broadband Traffic Management event IRL in London early last week. These events are good validation that DPI has grown up to get proper attention.
I was on-site at the event in London – and I apologies for the hotel lobby background noise on my line in the LR panel discussion. But I also had the pleasure to be on a panel in London together with Benny Lim from SingTel and David Hodgers from O2 Ireland, moderated by Mark Newman from Informa. The topic was “Lessons Learnt: The Do’s and Don’ts of Bandwidth Control”.
So what are the lessons learnt on bandwidth control? Let me quickly go through my conclusions and what I told the audience. When looking at do’s and don’ts I see two categories: what works and what ‘s ethical. The latter is more challenging with today’s fast moving social media where bad news travels fast and subscribers vote with their feet.
How do you manage this? Well, don’t expect to “get away with it”. Internet users are savvy and operators in London confirmed that non-transparency came back to bite them. You must be able to defend what you’re doing, and a good test is if you’d accept it yourself. Greed is not an acceptable reason, though a viable business case normally is.
Do’s and don’ts also depend on what you’re trying to achieve. DPI and bandwidth control spans over a broad range of applications, from network protection and congestion control to quality assurance and service differentiation. We tend to be very introvert and technology-driven in this industry, but you must start from business benefits and objectives in order to define intentions and make it understandable to your end-users.
The key to what works is knowing what’s going on. It’s not an option to guess what your customers do and how your network is doing. And conditions change – all the time. What used to be 80% filesharing a year and a half ago is today replaced with 40% streaming video as the largest bandwidth consumer. A policy rule-set that is not up-to-date will cause some strange consequences.
I wish I could provide a blueprint for what works, but every situation is unique. Your product mix, fixed and/or mobile, target groups, price positioning, and on top of this there are geographical differences like what applications are used and what bandwidth control practices are accepted.
This means that the number one thing to do is try. You will have to try it out and assess the outcome in your specific situation and your environment. I know this sound scary, but be adaptive, be quick, and make sure you make qualified decisions based on facts rather than guesstimates and assumptions.
Let me also summarize my don’ts: Don’t lie – be transparent. Don’t insert packets – honor integrity. Don’t get introverted and super techie – understand your business and your customers. And don’t do nothing – this is the most expensive decision of them all…
Let me wrap up with one more suggestion for what you should do: Keep it simple! Complexity kills this cat. If it’s too complicated you won’t be able to communicate to your subscribers, it’ll be impossible to update and change, and you won’t be able to measure if you successfully achieved what you intended to. This is hard to make simple – which is why we, Procera, are here to help 
Tags: bandwidth control, broadband, congestion control, deep packet inspection, DPI, filesharing, Internet, network protection, packets, policy rules, quality assurance, service differentiation, social media, streaming video, traffic management