As the development of the best appliances becomes more complicated, box builders like Allot are working with major software companies to enable ISPs to deliver the latest applications at the best possible speed and quality.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 16, 2008]

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is in the news, as appliance vendors build new boxes to help service providers manage bandwidth and deploy new applications.

Allot's latest is the ServiceProtector 4.0, which, the company says, is the first Allot product to incorporate technology obtained through the acquisition of Esphion Limited in January of 2008.

Allot's strategy is to sell DPI as an enabler of services, not just for traffic control.

"Last year at NXTComm," says Bill Mello, Allot's director of marketing, "we announced our service gateway product. It was the first open ATCA (Advanced Telecommunications and Computing Architecture)-based product. It was a scalable telco-classed product. When we introduced the product, we said at the time that our vision for it was more than classic DPI. Our vision was to enable value-added services that could use our core DPI capability to improve the overall performance of services. That was a new concept for DPI. No other vendor had talked about DPI enabling a broad range of services."

So Allot is talking about the partners whose applications are improved with Allot's DPI.

For example, soon to be announced is a VoIP call billing and quality service in partnership with Qosmos. The company focuses on what it calls "powerful ixDPI (Information eXtraction through Deep Packet Inspection) software modules or appliances" in order to ensure accurate billing and higher call quality.

Allot is working on video caching with PeerApp.

Allot is looking at the possibility of doing ad insertion with NebuAd, the company that was recently explaining its business to Congress.

"The common theme here," says Mello, is that our DPI solutions sort out traffic relevant to these applications. The application providers do not have to architect appliances to cope with every single packet."

The benefits to VoIP especially should be obvious.

The Qosmos solution, Mello says, delivers detailed information on phone calls that resembles the Call Data Records (CDRs) that telcos use for billing. It also tracks the quality of the phone call, delivering Mean Opinion Score (MOS) data to the service provider.

Is Mello worried about Congressional action or about the FCC's censuring of Comcast? Mello says that no ISP will get in trouble as long as they follow a few easy rules. "We don't manipulate any client's machine. We allow the service provider to put in place whatever QoS makes sense."

Will service providers start charging for bandwidth? "We believe people will move in this direction. Customers understand paying for bandwidth, and already cell phones have gone this way. Cable TV works this way. I think that's the direction where net neutrality is going: subscriber control. Subscribers will be able to pay more for a bandwidth boost capability."

Will ISPs block peer to peer? "P2P is not a unitary phenomenon. There are clearly legitimate P2P applications. It's an enabling technology. Don't lump it all into one ugly bucket. The trick is to distinguish good P2P from bad P2P. Joost, for example, is clearly legitimate."

Products planned
Some new services will be turned into blades that can be added to the ServiceProtector. Allot hopes to build a platform that application vendors will use. At the moment, Mello is talking about basic services such as DoS attack prevention, anti-virus, anti-spam, parental controls, and filtering. But more complex applications could be in the future, too.

"From the vendor's perspective, it allows the vendor to stick to their core competence," Mello says. "We don't have to become a video caching expert, and PeerApp doesn't have to become a DPI expert. Even telcos now can no longer afford to develop their own gear."

The bottom line on services, Mello says, is this. "Every ISP would go out of business if they were just charging $29.95 per month for unlimited bandwidth."

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