[UK]:"Unlike some countries", All ISPs Voluntary Signed for the Net Neutrality Code

The Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG) announced that "all of the UK’s leading Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have now signed up to a voluntary Code of  Practice in support of the Open Internet.

The Open Internet Code [here] was launched in 2012, building on previous work on the transparency of traffic management. EE, Virgin Media and Vodafone have recently signed up to the Open Internet Code, meaning that all major ISPs, operating across both fixed and mobile networks, are now signatories.

Matthew Evans [pictured], CEO of the BSG which facilitated the code, said: “Unlike some countries where net neutrality has become a controversial topic for discussion, the UK benefits from a fiercely competitive market and high levels of transparency – which together offer the best assurance of an Open Internet. The Code now provides an even stronger and more effective foundation, whilst also allowing for an environment where new business models for internetbased services which benefit consumer choice can thrive.”

The signatories of the code are: BT, BSkyB, EE, KCOM, giffgaff, O2, Plusnet, TalkTalk, Tesco Mobile, Three, Virgin Media and Vodafone. 

By agreeing to the code, they confirm that they will:

1. Ensure that full and open internet access products, with no blocked services, will be the norm within their portfolio of products.
    
2. Provide greater transparency in instances where certain classes of legal content,applications and/or services are unavailable on a product. These products will not be marketed as “internet access” and signatories will be obliged to ensure that any restrictions are clearly communicated to consumers.
    
3. Not target and degrade the content or applications of specific providers.Content providers are able to raise potential cases of targeted and negative discrimination with ISPs. If they are not satisfactorily resolved, these issues will be lodged with the BSG  who will share them with Ofcom and government. This initiative, which the BSG was asked to undertake on behalf of the Government, builds on the transparency code of practice published in 2011 which ensures that clear, understandable and comparable information on traffic management practices is available to consumers.

See "Remaining ISPs commit to the UK’s Open Internet Code" - here.

UK: How do ISPs Implement Network Based Parental Control Service?

Ofcom has "published a report for Government outlining measures the UK's largest internet service providers have put in place to help parents protect children from harmful content online. This follows an agreement between the Government and BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media, the four largest fixed line internet service providers (ISPs), announced in July 2013 [see "UK to Enforce Opt Out Network Based Web Filtering on All ISPs" - here]. Each ISP committed to offer new customers 'family-friendly network-level filtering' by the end of December 2013 [see "UK ISPs for Safer Internet" - here]" 

"The report finds that the four ISPs now have a network level family friendly filtering service .. There are a number of filtering categories common to all four ISPs. Suicide and self-harm, pornography, file sharing, crime, drugs, violence and hate are covered by each provider's classification systems .. All of the ISPs offer some additional services alongside the network family-friendly filters, some including internet security services aimed at protecting the subscriber from issues like viruses or malware. All offer device level filtering or security software for installation on individual computers

All of the ISPs have commissioned third parties to perform the categorisation of 

internet content and services: 

• BT and Virgin employ Nominum
• Sky uses Symantec 
• TalkTalk uses Huawei [see "Huawei's SIG: Policy Enforcement and URL Filtering" - here], although Symantec was also initially involved.

The filtering solutions rely on two basic technologies:

• Filtering by Uniform Resource Locator (URL) blocking: the filtering of sites or services based on their web address – either addresses covering whole websites (http://www.example.com) or individual sections or pages on those sites (http://www.example.com/adultpictures). This involves the ISP checking some or all of the URLs which an opted-in subscriber requests against the list of sites or pages to be blocked. If there is a match, the subscriber request is not fulfilled – typically a page with the message “this site is blocked because it is classified as…” may be delivered instead.

• Filtering by Domain Name System (DNS) alteration: the DNS translates domain names (“www.example.com” into IP addresses “192.0.32.10”), to allow a subscriber’s content request to be correctly directed – this is the first stage in requesting a website or service. When used for filtering, the ISP’s DNS server will not provide the IP address for domains on the list; it may instead direct the subscriber request to an information page with “this site is blocked because it is classified as…”.

Each of Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk has adopted a slightly different version of URL blocking; Sky’s filtering system is exclusively based on its DNS servers. The use of URL blocking allows a more granular classification of online content and services: Sky’s system will always block whole domains, while BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk can target specific parts of a domain.

See "Ofcom publishes report on internet safety measures" - here.

UK: ISPs will Alert Subscribers on Copyright Infringement

The UK has a new plan for reducing copyright infringement, as probably the older plans did not work - UK Culture Minister Vaizey:'SPs have their role to play to help consumers find legitimate content'"- here and "[UK]: Major ISPs Asked to Build 'Downloaders Database'" - here:

 "Representatives from the UK's creative industries and major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have come together with the support of government to launch Creative Content UK, a ground-breaking new partnership that will boost consumer awareness of the wide array of legitimate online content services and help reduce online copyright infringement.

Creative Content UK will comprise two key components. 

• The first, which will launch before Spring 2015, will be a major multi-media education awareness campaign, led by content creators and part-funded by government, that aims to create wider appreciation of the value and benefits of entertainment content and copyright. 

• The second component is a subscriber alerts programme that will be co-managed and co-funded by ISPs and content creators and due to begin at a later date. Participating ISPs will alert and advise subscribers when their accounts are believed to have been used to infringe copyright. Account holders will receive an alert from their ISP, advising them unlawful filesharing may have taken place on their connection and offering advice on where to find legitimate sources of entertainment content.

.. Creative Content UK founding partners include the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the BPI (British Recorded Music Industry), and the four main internet service providers: BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk and Virgin Media, with the prospect of other ISPs joining at a later stage .. The campaign will aim to inform and encourage consumers - ranging from the next generation of digital users to 'silver-surfers' – about the huge range of entertainment content that is available from legal and licensed sources; giving them greater confidence when buying and using content online and providing additional guidance about internet safety.

John Petter [pictured], CEO, BT Consumer, said: “BT is very pleased to be able to support this important announcement today. The UK has a world-leading creative sector which plays a vital role in promoting the nation’s economic prosperity. BT is committed to supporting the creative industries by helping to tackle the problem of online piracy while ensuring the best possible experience for its customers. That’s why we’ve worked very hard with rights-holders and other leading ISPs to develop a voluntary programme based on consumer education and awareness which promotes the use of legal online content.”

See "UK Creative Industries and ISPs Partner in Major New Initiative to Promote Legal Online Entertainment" - here.

UK ISPs for Safer Internet

TalkTalk announced recently that "Mother and daughter, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Janet Ellis today (13th May) launched Internet Matters, a world-leading child internet safety organisation founded by the UK’s four major broadband providers; BT [see "BT Launches DNS-based Parental Control; Does it Log Traffic?" - here], Sky, TalkTalk [see "TalkTalk Launches Free, Opt-in, Parental Control/Malware Detection Service" - here] and Virgin. 

The not-for-profit organisation sees the ‘big four’ put aside competition and join forces for the first time, to help parents safely navigate the internet with their children. The move will cement the UK’s position as a world-leader on child internet safety, advising parents to ‘learn about it, talk about it, deal with it’".

Related posts - "UK Government: No Need ("appetite") for Network Based Parental Control" - here and then "UK to Enforce Opt Out Network Based Web Filtering on All ISPs" - here.

The site's parental control page explains that "Broadband providers offer the ability to set network level parental controls on your home broadband network. They restrict access to particular programmes or sites, limit access times, and importantly filter out inappropriate content like pornography. They work on every device that is connected to your broadband network". 

See "Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Janet Ellis launch Internet Matters child internetsafety portal" - here.

[UK]: Ofcom Consumer Guide for Traffic Management

 

I am following the UK traffic management regulation since the early days of this blog (see "DPI Deployments - Part4: UK - Everybody is Doing it !" - here), as the UK ISPs are more transparent in their disclosure (voluntarily or by regulation - see "[UK]: Self Regulation doesn't Satisfy Ofcom; Publishes Minimum Disclosure Level" - here) compared to ISPs in other countries.

On top of all that, Ofcom published a new consumer guide, explaining consumers what is traffic management and exposing ISPs policies. They used the common comparing Broadband Traffic Management to motorways, serving variety of cars and

"With 46 million people in the UK having access to broadband and many using it for data heavy activities such as streaming and downloading, the internet is becoming increasingly busy.To ensure that networks operate efficiently, ISPs can restrict or ration traffic on their networks, or give priority to some types of traffic over others. This is known as ‘traffic management’.

"Each ISP has its own traffic management policy and so when choosing a provider you should check their policy meets your needs. Below you will find links to policies of the largest providers. If your ISP is not on this list, visit your provider’s website or speak to their customer services department: BT, Karoo, Plusnet, Sky, TalkTalk, Virgin Media (National and Cable), O2 (Home broadband and mobile broadband), EE (Handsets, broadband and mobile,broadband), Three, Vodafone."

See "New consumer guide on internet ‘traffic management’" - here.

[UK]: Major ISPs Asked to Build "Downloaders Database"

I thought that fighting music sharing is no longer an issue, as reasonably priced legal services are very successful - but it turns out that the record industry is still thinking of a new ways to stop downloaders. The recent one is BPI that represents the UK’s recorded music industry.

Dave Neal report to The Inquirer that "Four UK internet service providers (ISPs) have been invited to help create a database of allegedly illegal downloaders for music record labels and film companies. Four firms - BT, Virgin Media, Bskyb and Talktalk - have been asked to provide information on a voluntary basis.

Virgin Media spokesperson Emma Hutchinson said that "what they're currently proposing is unworkable"; BT said that it was open to suggestions that would not harm its users' rights to privacy".

See "Media companies want a downloader database" - here.

[The Register]: All Major UK ISPs to Implement Network-based Parental Control

 
More than a year after the leading UK ISPs "Committed for Opt-In Parental Control" (here), it seems that the ISPs are actually going there, with network-based filtering service. 

Could be one of the reasons to the recent excitement among DPI vendors ("$6M Parental Control Win for Allot in EMEA (with Partner)" - here and "Procera Adds High Performance Web Content Categorization & Filtering" - here).

Kelly Fiveash (pictured) reports to The Register that all major UK ISPs - BSkyB, Virgin Media and BT will follow the pioneer TalkTalk (here) and offer network based parental control/web filtering service.

"BSkyB confirmed that it had concluded that computer-based parental controls were no longer enough to protect kids who use web-based services on a variety of devices. It will shortly begin filtering content using DNS lookup .. And DNS lookup appears to be the preferred method: it's to be adopted by Virgin Media and BT, too".

 

See "All major UK ISPs prepping network-level porn 'n' violence filters" - here.

BT Broadband to Stop Traffic Management and Data Caps

BT announced that it has "..raised the stakes in the battle for broadband customers by introducing Totally Unlimited Broadband on all but its entry level offerings – and cutting the price. The UK’s most popular broadband now comes without any usage limits and free from traffic management from just £16 a month for 16Mbps copper broadband, £23 for 38Mbps Infinity or £26 for 76Mbps Infinity".

John Petter (pictured), managing director of BT’s Consumer division, said: “.. Customers told us that they wanted to be able to enjoy catch-up TV, streamed films and other bandwidth-eating applications without having to worry about going over their limit or being slowed down by their ISP .. but we wanted to make that really affordable too, without the sort of traffic management Virgin Media, TalkTalk or EE customers may find themselves subject to. Unlike Sky, we’re extremely confident that our network can stand up to the extra bandwidth demands from totally unlimited products everywhere across the UK"

See "BT launches better value totally unlimited broadband" - here.

Huawei's SIG: Policy Enforcement and URL Filtering

More than 2 years ago I had a post about the use of Huawei's solution by TalkTalk for web filtering (parental control) service - see "TalkTalk Uses Huawei to Detect Malware (or Parental Control?)" - here.

Later TalkTalk provided more details on the service itself (HomeSafe) - see "TalkTalk [UK] Launches Free, Opt-in, Parental Control/Malware Detection Service" - here.

A recent document by Huawei provides more technical information on the product used by TalkTalk - Service Intelligence Gateway (SIG):

"Huawei provided its Service Intelligence Gateway (SIG) solution, which can be deployed on a fixed (between the broadband remote access server and international gateway), mobile (at the Gi, Pi, or ASN-GW egress), or converged network. Its architecture is simple, consisting of a front end, back end, upgrade center, and cloud security center.

The front end is responsible for analysis, reporting, and policy enforcement, while the back end manages SIG systems, users, and policies. The back end automatically receives the latest knowledge base and URL classification statistics from the upgrade center and cloud security center, without service interruption, while providing SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) interfaces to enable/disable services and configure policies. Based on its interfaces, service providers can develop self-service portals by themselves or through Huawei, while operators can use the SIG to deliver AoS (Alert of Security) messages to customers.

With its carrier-class router platform, Huawei SIG performance is assured through its ASIC and multi-core network processors – service throughput can reach 120Gbps on fixed networks and 100Gbps for mobile. Reliability is another key feature, thanks to redundancy in SIG’s design for boards and key components, both on the front end and the back. The system is also equipped with professional-grade bypass devices, to protect links against anomalies. During upgrade, operators need only replace the interface or service board (overhaul is unnecessary).

SIG boasts a library of over 65 million URLs in 43 categories, which operators can customize as required. Based on an industry-leading malicious code detection technology, SIG can filter malicious URLs dynamically, keeping viruses and other malware out of the home. If something is detected, the system can send alerts to users".

See "TalkTalk provides online protection for families" - here.

UK: Broadband ISPs (except Sky) Still Limit P2P; Some Prioritize VoIP!

 
Thomas Newton (pictured) reports to recombu on the "Fair Use Policies - FUP’s - of the UK’s main ISPs and seen how they stack up against each other" as "Knowing what the traffic management policy of an ISP entails is as important as doing your homework on things like the monthly usage cap, the cost of line rental, customer service and bundled services like digital TV or phone plans".

The article covers BT Broadband, Virgin Media, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk and Everything Everywhere Broadband (see also "UK: ISPs Publish New Voluntary Code on Broadband Traffic Management" - here). 
 
"Sky Broadband is perhaps unique among the UK’s major ISPs in that it doesn't apply any kind of traffic management at all" - but everybody else still limit P2P file sharing (here) - although P2P's share of total traffic is lower now as streaming traffic increases; Netflix alone has now 1M subscribers in the UK - (here). 

 

TalkTlak and EE Broadband prioritize some traffic - such as VoIP (both), gaming (EE) and even Web browsing (TalkTalk).
See "Traffic Management, FUP’s and Throttling: EE throttles P2P, speeds up gaming" - here.

Large UK ISPs will Fight Copyright Infringements

Being fashionably late (for a party that is almost over now - see "French Copyright Law - 165 Cases Reached Court; File Sharing Declines" - here), the UK regulator, Ofcom published a "draft code for consultation that would require large internet service providers (ISPs) to inform customers of allegations that their internet connection has been used to infringe copyright".

See also "UK Culture Minister Vaizey:"ISPs have their role to play to help consumers find legitimate content" - here and

"The code will initially cover ISPs with more than 400,000 broadband-enabled fixed lines – currently BT, Everything Everywhere, O2, Sky, TalkTalk Group and Virgin Media. Together these providers account for more than 93% of the retail broadband market in the UK. The draft code requires ISPs to send letters to customers, at least a month apart, informing them when their account is connected to reports of suspected online copyright infringement.

If a customer receives three letters or more within a 12-month period, anonymous information may be provided on request to copyright owners showing them which infringement reports are linked to that customer’s account. The copyright owner may then seek a court order requiring the ISP to reveal the identity of the customer, with a view to taking legal action for infringement under the Copyright Designs and Patent Act 1988".

What seems to be a long process will start now and "Ofcom currently expects the first customer notification letters to be sent in early 2014"

See "New measures to protect online copyright and inform consumers" - here.

UK ISPs Ordered to Block Pirate Bay

The BBC reports that "File-sharing site The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK internet service providers, the High Court has ruled. The Swedish website hosts links to download mostly pirated free music and video. Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media must all prevent their users from accessing the site".

Few months ago a similar order was issued in the matter of Newzbin2 (see "UK Court Orders BT to Block Newzbin2 in 14 Days, Using DPI" - here).

Like always, I should mention that the UK regulator, Ofcom, believes that "All site blocking techniques can be circumvented" (here).

See "The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs, court rules" - here.

UK: Top 4 ISPs Committed for Opt-In Parental Control

   
The UK government is pushing ISPs for many months now to offer a paternal control service (see "UK Government Pushes ISPs (Again) to Provide Better Parental Control" - here and "UK Government Wants "Opt Out" Parental Control" - here).

It seems that the goal was partially achieved now. The leading ISPs have committed to offer parental control, however as an opt-in service. 

UK's "#10" (stands for the Prime Minister) site reports that " .. Prime Minister and Children’s Minister, Sarah Teather (pictured) have hosted a summit at Downing Street on tackling the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood .. The commitment from the top four internet service providers (BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin) that all customers will receive an active choice at the point of purchase over whether they want to block adult content on their home internet or laptops".

Children’s Minister, Sarah Teather, said: "I welcome the tighter rules on advertising, and extra help for parents to control what their children view on the internet. These actions are important steps in the right direction".

See "PM launches Parentport website" - here.

UK Government Pushes ISPs (Again) to Provide Better Parental Control

 

A new report by Reg Baily, Chief Executive of Mothers’ Union, commissioned by the UK Department of Education, recommends "Making it easier for parents to block adult and age-restricted material from the internet. To provide a consistent level of protection across all media, as a matter of urgency, the internet industry should ensure that customers must make an active choice over what sort of content they want to allow their children to access. To facilitate this, the internet industry must act decisively to develop and introduce effective parental controls, with Government regulation if voluntary action is not forthcoming within a reasonable timescale."

See "Letting Children be Children - Report of an Independent Review of the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood" - here and video below. The report is available here 

UK Prime Minister David Cameron (pictured with Mr. Baily) supported it and "has warned ISPs to be more robust with their plans to provide better tools to help parents censor sexualised content online, or else the government could step in with its own regulation measures" (see "Cameron calls for ISP-level parental censorship tools" - here)

This is not the first time we see government pressure in the UK to so that (here amd here) and TalkTalk already announced such service, dubbed Homesafe, for free (here, using Huawei equipment).

DPI Deployments (68): TalkTalk [UK] Launches Free, Opt-in, Parental Control/Malware Detection Service

    

TalkTalk announced that it  ".. has launched HomeSafe; the UK’s first network level broadband security service. HomeSafe is unique in providing protection at a network level rather than on an individual computer, which means it works on all devices connected to a home broadband connection – from PCs and laptops to smartphones and games consoles .. All settings can be changed, or turned on or off, by the account holder at any time ..  The default setting of the services is ‘off’ ".

See "TalkTalk launches major new internet security product to provide network-level protection"  - here

 
The solution was provided by Huawei and operates by checking/filtering URLs - See "TalkTalk Uses Huawei to Detect Malware (or Parental Control?)" - here. 
 
The 3 services launched under the HomeSafe product are: 

• Virus Alerts – a simple click will enable an alert system which blocks web pages infected with any kind of malware, to protect customers’ computers and other devices;
   
• KidsSafe parental controls – allows the TalkTalk account holder to block the content they don’t want to be accessed through their connection, such as pornography, violence and/or gambling.
   
• Homework Time – this allows parents to block social networking sites like Facebook and online gaming which are common sources of distraction for school children from their homework.

Tristia Clarke, Commercial Director of TalkTalk said: "..Of course, it’s not a silver bullet and it doesn’t absolve parents from the responsibility of knowing what their children are up to online. But our research shows parents understand this. They don’t want their ISP to control what content they can or can’t access online – they just want their ISP to give them the power to implement settings that are right for their family".
 

 

  

UK Government Wants "Opt Out" Parental Control

     

Follow-up on a previous post (here) - Caroline Davies from UK's Guardian reports that Ed Vaizey, the communications minister is going "to meet internet providers, including BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk, "in the near future" to discuss changing the way pornography enters private homes".

See "Broadband firms urged to block sex websites to protect children" - here.

The new idea will be that "broadband providers should consider automatically blocking sex sites, with individuals being required to opt in to receive them, rather than opt out and use the available computer parental controls."

"Virgin Media said that it had already implemented the technology on its mobile service, but said that parents can control what their children see at home and online. A BT spokesman said they had a "clean feed" system to stop access to illegal sites."

BT''s response refers to a different requirement, which UK ISPs decided to implement on a "self-regulation" basis - blocking  web sites presenting illegal content, such as child pornography to all subscribers (known as "blacklist" and monitored by organizations like the IWF - Internet Watch Foundation).

 "Andrew Heaney, TalkTalk's executive director of strategy and regulation, told the newspaper: "Our objective was not to do what the politicians want us but to do what is right for our customers. If other companies aren't going to do it of their own volition, then maybe they should be leant on." [see DPI Deployment (15) : TalkTalk Uses Huawei to Detect Malware (or Parental Control?) - here] 

There is a big difference between the blacklist and a full paternal control service - including the size of the URL database, its update rate, and the need for subscriber awareness, policy-based control and service portal when implementing paternal control.

Related links:

Infonetics Research: Policy Management is not only Bandwidth Control - here
Kosher Mobile Internet - Cellcom Israel Offers Web Filtering - here

BBC: "traffic management may sometimes be necessary"

 

In a recent blog post to the BBC site, Erik Huggers, claims that "Until that capacity is in place, the BBC recognises that traffic management may sometimes be necessary for technical reasons - for example to cope with legitimate network congestion. But this should be the exception. An emerging trend towards network operators discriminating in favour of certain traffic based on who provides it, as part of commercial arrangements, is a worrying development.". Seems like "compromise" is a good, politically correct approach recently (a la Verizon-Google - here).

See "Net Neutrality and the BBC" - here. 

The worrying development is "TalkTalk, BT: we'd put iPlayer in the slow lane"- here. " Asked specifically if TalkTalk would afford more bandwidth to YouTube than the BBC's iPlayer if Google was prepared to pay, the company's executive director of strategy and regulation, Andrew Heaney, argued it would be "perfectly normal business practice to discriminate between them". "We would do a deal and look at YouTube and look at the BBC, and decide," he added.

 

Back to BBC - "We've expressed this and other concerns to the industry regulator Ofcom and to the European Commission as part of their consultation on the issue. At this stage new legislation is not needed, since effective new EU rules have already been passed. But we do need the determination of regulators to now fully implement these rules, to prevent the emergence of practices which undermine the open internet which we so often take for granted"

QoS Deployments (31): TalkTalk [UK] Uses Velocix (Alcatel-Lucent) for Content Delivery

    

Alcatel-Lucent announced that "it has signed a three-year agreement with TalkTalk Group, the biggest provider of broadband to Britain’s homes, to build a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This CDN network, which will run over TalkTalk’s existing high speed IP network, puts content closer to the end user to increase the quality of experience for its digital on-demand TV customers beyond that which is available over the Internet today. The agreement, which also covers managed services, installation and commissioning, leverages the powerful technology gained through Alcatel-Lucent’s acquisition of Velocix"

See "UK's TalkTalk to build new network specifically designed to deliver high quality digital on-demand TV" - here.

“We are witnessing an explosion in data traffic over both fixed and mobile networks which is set to continue,” said Paul Larbey, Vice President and General Manager of Velocix, a wholly owned subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent. “Our aim is to work with TalkTalk to develop an intelligent network architecture that can handle the extra demand efficiently while at the same time, creating the potential for new revenues by exposing the assets within the network in a secure way.”

As we see more and more CDNs operated by carriers (see BT case below)- should we expect some reaction from the legacy CDN providers?

What does it mean for the eco-system of content owners, publishers, distributors and network operators?

Related posts:

• QoS Deployments (25): BT Selects Cisco's Video Content Delivery System - here
• Video Caching Market Finally Growing - here
• Alcatel-Lucent Adds Bluecoat's Over-the-Top Caching to its Velocix CDN Solution - here
• QoS Deployments (30): Orcon [New Zealand] Uses Velocix [ALU] to Improve Video QoE - here  

 

DPI Deployment (15) : TalkTalk Uses Huawei to Detect Malware (or Parental Control?)

Chris Williams from The Register describes how TalkTalk (UK) is implementing a DPI system from Huawei to detect security threats from web sites accessed by its subscribers.

See "TalkTalk turns StalkStalk to build malware blocker" - here.

"The new system is provided by Chinese vendor Huawei, and customers can't opt out of the data collection exercise. As they browse the web, URLs are recorded and checked against a blacklist of sites known to carry malware. They are also compared to a whitelist of sites that have been scanned for threats and approved in the last 24 hours. If a URL appears on neither list, Huawei servers follow the user to the page and scan the code. ... A spokeswoman for the firm told The Register "Our scanning engines receive no knowledge about which users visited what sites (e.g. telephone number, account number, IP address), nor do they store any data for us to cross-reference this back to our customers"

"When the blocking features and parental controls of the system are activated, customers will be asked if they want to opt in at no extra cost, TalkTalk representatives said. The service will launch in the second half of this year once testing is complete, the spokeswoman added"

(picture: Clive Dorsman (right), Managing Director, TalkTalk Technology and Athena Wang, General Manager of Fixed Line, Huawei UK)

Value-Added Services, such as paternal control or malware detection could be also a monetization opportunity for ISPs - see "Cisco: "New Capabilities, New Business Models, New Revenues" - here.

Note that Talktalk demerged from Carphone Warehouse in March 2010 (here). Carphone Warehouse is an old customer of Sandvine (here), which could potentially offer the above solution.

Related posts:

• Chile: First Country to Legislate Net Neutrality  - here
• DPI Solution: KindSight's Security VAS - here 

DPI Deployments - Part4: UK - Everybody is Doing it !

     

On June 2008, the UK regulator Ofcom published its Voluntary Code of Practice: Broadband Speeds "a voluntary and self-regulatory measure" (here). The code suggests that ISPs will disclose to their subscribers (and the public) the real service levels they provide.

In particular interest to our discussion is section 39: "Where ISPs apply traffic management and shaping policies, they should publish on their website, in a clear and easily accessible form, information on the restrictions applied. This should include the types of applications, services and protocols that are affected and specific information on peak traffic periods"

Ofcom maintains a list of ISPs that endorsed the code (here). The list has over 50 names, including all leading UK ISPs.

These ISPs should according to section 33 - "use their best endeavours to set out clearly, and in a prominent place on their websites (e.g. within help or FAQs sections), information relating to their respective policies on fair usage; traffic management and traffic shaping to cover, at a minimum, the matters set out below."


In my earlier post - "Net-Neutrality Crosses the Pond" (here) I brought the relevant policies of the UK leading ISPs - Plusnet, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Sky - having in total over 15M subscribers. Plusnet even issued a press release "PlusNet welcome Ofcom's Broadband Speed Code of Practice" (here) saying that "Although the code of practice is certainly a step in the right direction, we would question whether these voluntary guidelines go far enough"

As we can see, the majority of the internet traffic in the UK is subject to traffic control. Some of the ISPs' stated policies could not be achieved without DPI (needed, for example, to detect "downloads") - and there even some public announcements on that:

• Plusnet (BT retail service) is using Ellacoya (now Arbor Networks) - see PlusNet Picks Ellacoya (here). This was one the first DPI deployments by a larger ISP, world-wide.
   
• Carphone (TalkTalk) is using Sandvine - "Carphone Warehouse Selects Sandvine to Enhance Subscriber Internet Experience" (here) - one of the earlier adapters of Sandvine's 10Gbps DPI product. Carphone consumer retail service is TalkTalk (listed above).

While using DPI for traffic management, fair-use or congestion management seems to be well accepted in the UK, the imitative of several ISPs to use DPI for targeted advertizing (using a solution from the UK based Phorm) failed with severe consequences:

UK ISP BT Could Face CPS Prosecution over Secret Phorm Trials  - "The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has confirmed that it is still assessing the prospect of opening a criminal case against BT following the operator’s secret trials of Phorm in 2006/2007. Phorm controversially worked with UK broadband ISPs ( BT , TalkTalk and Virgin Media ) to develop a system that would monitor what websites you viewed for use in targeted advertising campaigns, though many likened its service to Spyware." (here)

Showing us the good and bad in DPI - and maybe it is better to disclose your service details rather being "secret".