Blog News: DPI Product List

A new page was added to the permanent tab link - DPI Products.

Currently, the table provides basic information on the major DPI products, offering traffic management features. The highest-end product of each vendor is presented.

Vendors covered: Cisco, Allot, Sandvine, Arbor (Ellacoya), Procera, Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson.

Plusnet: Troubles with Traffic Management System

 

2 days ago I mentioned Plusnet's (UK) traffic management policies, providing advanced application-based tiering (here) - and today I saw that the operator has experienced some issues with the DPI system used to implement it (from Ellacoya-Arbor Networks - see "U.K. Provider PlusNet Addresses Network Management With Tiered Services and Transparency" - here)

Bob Pullen, from Plusnet's Customer Support, writes to his customers about "..the problems we've been experiencing with our traffic management platform. Because of these problems, your Internet connection may not have been performing as well as you would normally expect."

See here. Needless to say (and may be irrelevant to Plusnet’s unfortunate problem), that like all critical network components, DPI and their management systems (policy servers, for example) need to have a well-thought redundancy design. One example (rather basic with partial redundancy) is shown in the following chart:

"Our network engineers have managed to partially restore service, and the traffic management platform is now processing requests again. Customers should be aware that there are certain cases where we will have to manually fix accounts. This particularly applies to customers who changed account type today or have recently entered/exited failed billing. We will be looking to fix these accounts tomorrow where necessary. We still need to swap out some hardware and restore resiliency to the platform so we're not completely out of the water yet."

QoS Deployments (22): Demon [UK] Offers "Game Pro" Plan - w/Traffic Prioritization

 

Demon, a UK ISP, launched a new "Game Pro" service plan that "offers the usual benefits that Demon Broadband offers, along with lower latency and better ping rates."

See "Demon launches gaming broadband service" press release and blog post, here.

The new plan offers, for £22/month (12 months contract): Up to 20Mb downstream and 1Mb upstream, no usage restrictions off peak, 100GB peak (8am to 11pm), traffic prioritization and a free static IP address.

A comparable plan is Demon's Home2+, with 50GB volume and no prioritization, offered for £15.28 month (24 months contract) and subject to Demon's Fair Use Policy ("FUP" - here). FUP states that "Usage will be monitored on a continuous basis. Customers that exceed the permitted data download over a rolling 30 day period will be affected by the THUS FUP. This is currently defined as per the limits detailed below, although we reserve the right to amend these limits in accordance with the terms of your Agreement. ". 

According to KITS ("UK's largest adsl/broadband resource & information sites"), Demon is using Ellacoya (now part of Tektronix Communications) DPI products to implement FUP (here).

Will the Game Pro subscribers just bypass the DPI process, or will Demon use the Ellacoya devices to prioritize certain [gaming] traffic? Does it remove P2P restrictions [if any]?

Anyway, this is one of the few QoS based tiered services offering, targeting an ARPU increase of ~£6-7/month (50%!).