Sorry, there should be a question mark at the end of that heading, and the answer is No! The fact is you need to invest in DPI now. I know I’m biased, but that’s why I possess hands-on knowledge and facts of what our customers do and why.
DPI does not equal P2P throttling and Net Neutrality infringement. P2P control originally presented itself as an opportunity for DPI with a quick ROI on a hair-on-fire issue where P2P filesharing rampaged at an exponential growth rate, which meant exponential cost. But today we’re in the second, or I would even argue the third generation of DPI, and both products, and the use of these products, have evolved and become much more sophisticated.
Today the most common request is visibility. Visibility of what traffic is traversing the network in order to detect changes early in user behavior to avoid surprises on the core business and business models. Today’s rapid increase in streaming video is both a threat and an opportunity to cable MSOs, whose core business is TV distribution.
This is a good illustration of why network traffic intelligence is so important. Today we don’t watch TV as we did before. We don’t watch in real-time since we have TiVo and subscribe to episodes as they are “released”. It’s just a small step to Hulu and the broadcasting companies’ Play services. Early detection of these phenomena gives the operator the ability to offer relevant packages, change pricing, and develop new services without being left far behind.
In all honesty, very few of our customers and prospects even consider limitation of competing over-the-top (OTT) services. Savvy end-users catch what they do, draw attention to it, and the operator is caught with their pants down. You don’t “get away with it”.
But knowledge is power. Based on proper network intelligence you can make proper decisions. For example reach out to emerging services and join them instead of trying to beat them, look at the value add of your paid-for services compared to free OTT services, see the impact on your network of new applications, and project the investments required to accommodate these new services.
You could actually go as far as to say that DPI is required to enable Net Neutrality. Transparency is a cornerstone in Net Neutrality and DPI offers the tools that verify that you are transparent, that you’re not preventing good service levels due to obsolete policies supporting an old reality.
We, Procera, have not seen an impact on our DPI business from Net Neutrality, and I think it’s due to the above. Operators understand this, have understood why DPI is necessary, how it’s used properly, and are able to discard the background noise of an infected discussion while listening to creative and reasonable input.
Tags: control, deep packet inspection, DPI, filesharing, Hulu, net neutrality, network intelligence, P2P, policy rules, throttling, TiVo, traffic management
World Wide Web (WWW) inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee puts the problem like this:
[...]
“Net neutrality is this:
——————
If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level. That’s all.
It’s up to the ISPs tomake sure they interoperate so that that happens. Net Neutrality is NOT asking for the Internet for free. Net Neutrality is NOT saying that one shouldn’t pay more money for high quality of service. We always have,
and we always will.
There have been suggestions that we don’t need legislation because we haven’t had it. These are nonsense, because in fact we have had net neutrality in the past – it is only recently that real explicit threats have occurred.
In short, net neutrality is about the rules of the road for Internet users,
and about the relationship between the owners of those roads and the users.”
[...]
Reference: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144
There is a very interesting document available as pdf called
Net Neutrality – Towards a Co-regulatory Solution written by CHRISTOPHER T. MARSDEN.
In my opinion DPI-Equipment is REQUIRED to solve the “problem” of Net-Neutrality. How to define rules for the roads of the internet if you have no idea about the traffic? Without DPI you would have to define “rules of thumb” mostly which may work or won’t work opening the doors to arbitrariness.