DPI for Bandwidth Shaping? Where's the news?

There seem to be several conversations happening on service providers using DPI to throttle traffic. My reaction? What's the big deal?

This is another case of the media looking for a story that isn't there. Service providers of all sorts have been using bandwidth shaping [DPI] since the early 90's. Technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), had bandwidth shaping in their specifications and ATM was one of the core transports of service providers. UBR , CBR, VBR anyone? Why is this a surprise?

It reminds me of the Global Warming debate. Al Gore has been talking about it since the 70's - yet when he was vice president nothing got done about it. Not his fault, he's just one man. But if he were vice president now with Global Warming such a hot topic, pardon the pun, the media's pressure would bend the will of the people to solve the "issue".

Just yesterday, based on some guys figuring out what statistical packet analysis can get you, everybody went crazy again on this topic. Statistical packet analysis was around WELL before this paper. A bunch of guys from MIT started Mazu, which built a company based on this concept. Arbor is another company that leveraged this, well before Mazu did. So what's the hype? I guess it's a slow news day.

Posted by Dennis Cox

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Tags: DPI Testing // Network Traffic Generation //