I spent the semi-final in a bar in North Africa. Together with two Lebanese and a Dutch guy. The Lebanese have been such great supporters of the German team, that I doubt to find “greater” fans somewhere in Germany. The second greatest wish of the Dutch, after winning the final, was to win it against Germany. Unfortunately, Germany lost the game.

Anyway, never before we as ipoque got so many e-mails from customers and partners from all over the world gratulating us for the German team. I would like to take the chance to thank all of you for your sympathy and your support during the last weeks.

Sure, football is just a minor matter, but probably the most exciting one in the world!

Last week I participated in a meeting of the German Association of Telecommunications and Value-Added Service Providers (VATM), which got together to establish a net neutrality working group. The discussion pretty much reiterated the arguments that have been exchanged in the United States for quite some time now. So far this has not been a big topic in Germany or Europe outside of some expert and activist circles. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes it seems to me that in Germany some political and social decisions take longer than in the rest of the world. This was my impression when I listened to the panel discussion at the GVU Branchenforum in Berlin last week.

GVU, a German organization against copyright infringements, did a good job and invited a great variety of guests. Not only representatives of the content industry participated in the discussion, but also a state attorney, a representative of the German ISP’s association eco and the chief editor of gulli, a portal that calls itself “worst pirate cave”. This diversity made the discussion really controversial and fascinating. Read the rest of this entry »

Honestly, I am surprised by the great response to OpenDPI. Two weeks after releasing version 1.0 we have counted 1000 downloads. This is much more than we expected for this very special piece of software.

Making the own intellectual property public is an interesting experience. Of course we had a long internal discussion about that irreversible step beforehand. What do we give away and what will we get back?  What will other people say about our software? But all responses showed that it was the right step. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I participated in a workshop session called “Deep Packet Inspection: Technology, Promise & Controversy. What You Need to Know.” at the Broadband World Forum Europe 2009 in Paris. The panel discussion with participants from DPI vendors, Internet service providers and net neutrality activists was meant to “foster an open, balanced and rigorous discussion of DPI’s capabilities, benefits, limits and concerns”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Many Internet users worry about net neutrality and online privacy these days. And they see deep packet inspection (DPI) as their arch enemy. Common claims are that DPI reads the content of all packets and then decides based on the nature of the content whether to forward, slow down or drop that packet. This is a misconception based on poor understanding how today’s DPI for Internet traffic management works. Read the rest of this entry »

We have observed an interesting change of user behavior in peer-to-peer file sharing networks after the unexpected death of the legendary King of Pop Michael Jackson on June 25.

Our diagram shows the download behavior in popular P2P networks in Germany of Michael Jackson's discography (red line) and albums (all other lines) starting from July 1 until August 24. The data are normalized to a maximum number of file transfers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Finally!! We have been waiting for these test results for quite some time yet. The actual measurements were conducted back in January. So what happened then? As noted in the Internet Evolution test report published last Thursday, “Vendors got the right to review their results and our interpretations related to their results“. Apparently, some vendors took longer for this process to finish than others. Let’s not speculate about the reasons here. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I gave a presentation at HITEC, the world’s largest hospitality technology event. Originally, I only wanted to pitch the use of bandwidth management technology to provide a business-grade hotel Internet access with quality of service guarantees for important applications. But after talking with a number of property managers and companies that provide IT services to them, another big issue came up: copyright infringements by guests for which the hotel as the Internet access provider is liable. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of our competitors use specialized hardware for their bandwidth management solutions. We don’t.
So people always ask the same question: How can your products perform that well without a high performance accelerator chip? And then we explain why it is a good idea not to use specialized hardware: it is all about reliability, flexibility and performance.

Read the rest of this entry »