Israel: Will ISPs have to Send Detailed Surfing Records to Subscribers?

Gilad Erdan,Minister
of Communications 

Earlier this month, Israel's Ministry of Communications (the local regulator) published 2 calls for hearing about new parental control services to be provided by broadband ISPs (here) and MNOs (here, both in Hebrew).

According to the documents, only a small number of the subscribers have signed for the filtering services of harmful sites. These services should be provided by all licensed ISPs and MNOs for free.

Related posts:

• [Israel]: Why were ISPs Fined for not Promoting Free Parental Control Services? - here
• [Israel]: ISPs will have to Offer Free Web Filtering Service - here
• UK: How do ISPs Implement Network Based Parental Control Service?  - here

In order to increase public awareness to the risks, and to the SPs solutions, the Ministry is considering requiring SPs to add the following services to the filtering service:

• Allowing subscribers to manage the time of day and duration of surfing, with an option for flexibility and changes
   
• The SP will send, on a daily weekly or monthly basis, a report by Email a report on all sites visited by the subscriber
   
• The SP will allow the use of "user names" on a single device, enabling the service to some of the user names
   
• The filtering service will not affect the browsing QoE
   
• The subscriber will be able to select between a device based or a network-based service 

And again - all the above is expected to be provided for free!!!

Cisco: How does ASR 5000 Monitor and Control OTT VoIP?

An updated document by Cisco provides information on the DPI capabilities of the ASR-5000 (here). In addition to the long list of detected protocols, the following features are listed:

• P2P Voice Call Duration: The ADC product has the capability to detect network traffic created by P2P VoIP clients such as Skype, Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk, Oscar. The VoIP call duration is a direct indication to the revenue impact of the network operator. The ADC product is well poised to process the network traffic online to detect and control the VoIP presence, and generate records that can be used to calculate the VoIP call durations.
      
• Random Drop Charging Action - The random drop charging action is added as an option to degrade P2P voice calls. This is achieved by randomly dropping packets of the voice calls over the voice call period. Voice data is encoded in multiple packets by the codec. Since there is a possibility of packets being dropped in a network, the codec replicates the same information across multiple packets. This provides resilience to random packet drops in the network. For a considerable degradable voice quality, a chunk of packets need to be dropped. By this way, the codec will be unable to decode the required voice information. The chunk size for achieving degradation of voice call varies from one protocol to another. The Random Drop decision has to be made once for a chunk of packets. By choosing the random drop time from a configured range, the drop is achieved at random seconds within a configured range. The packets will drop within a known period of time. For example, if a voice call happens for 2 minutes and if we configure a drop interval of 12–15 seconds, then a packet will be dropped within the first 15 seconds of the voice call.

Nevertheless - Skype classification is not perfect:

• The Skype detection cannot detect traffic of most of the third-party plug-ins. The plug-ins use Skype only for marketing and presentation purposes such as opening a window within a Skype window or modifying the main Skype window with buttons or sounds. These plug-ins do NOT use the Skype protocol to transfer data over the network.
   
• Other than Skype Voice, all detected Skype traffic is marked as Skype. Distinctions between different data types within Skype (i.e. text chat, file transfer, and so on) cannot be made.
     
• Skype voice detection may not be accurate if it happens with other traffic (file transfer, video, etc.) on the same flow. 



Source: Cisco



See "Cisco ASR 5000 Series Application Detection and Control Administration Guide" - here.

HP Adds Qosmos DPI to its Data Retention Solution

   

HP announced that "it has integrated application probe capabilities from Qosmos into HP DRAGON [see chart below], the company's data retention solution that helps telecom companies and law enforcement agencies fight terrorism and organized crime .. The integration of Qosmos Network Intelligence probes broadens the already strong data collection capabilities in HP DRAGON"

See "HP enhances DRAGON Data Collection with Qosmos to streamline telecoms' fight against terror and crime" - here.

"Qosmos' technology queries the CSP's IP network in real-time as if it were a database, filtering only relevant data and creating call data records (CDRs) that are optimized for storage and analysis," said Thibaut Bechetoille, president and CEO of Qosmos. "As a result, HP DRAGON can help service providers respond quickly and cost-effectively to legal and investigative requests for electronic evidence."

"In contrast to storing raw network data, the HP and Qosmos technologies use aggregation and correlation to store data intelligently. This approach yields benefits for CSPs:

• Improves the quality of the information stored in the repository
• Improves performance by reducing record counts
• Reduces storage requirements by storing a single intelligent record, not many individual records"

Related posts:

• DPI Announcements: CommProve and Qosmos Offer Layer 7 Visibility into Mobile Traffic - here
• DPI Announcements: Data Retention System from Bivio - here
• DPI Deployments (37): Momentum Telecom Use VoIP CDRs to Troubleshoot and Generate Business - here

 

DPI Deployments (37): Momentum Telecom Use VoIP CDRs to Troubleshoot and Generate Business

   

DPI technology allows service providers to dive into specific application and analyze application-specific information in order to troubleshoot service quality problems, generate marketing data, analyze usage patterns and more - all this by analyzing network traffic, with no need to connect to the application/s server (VoIP softswitch, for example), whether the providers owns it or not, and analyze information from multiple services and providers in central system.   

Jessica Scarpati from searchtelecom describes such a project, deployed by Momentum Telecom. See "Telecom VoIP CDR analytics improve service quality assurance, cut MTTR" - here.

"You can't say you have a quality product if you can't measure it," said Anthony Orlando, vice president of engineering at Momentum, a US-based VoIP service provider that wholesales to 230 cable operators across the country. "Momentum tried homegrown and commercial VoIP analysis and monitoring tools, but the analytics were too superficial to be really useful, said Orlando, declining to name the commercial product".

VoIP monitoring solutions are also offered by DPI vendors such as Sandvine (here), a joint solution from Allot and Qosmos(here, chart below), Cisco (here) and Ipoque (here). The use of DPI/Traffic management solutions allows the service provider to take corrective actions, such as prioritizing the VoIP traffic.