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.

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A few weeks ago, American cable operator Comcast was questioned by regulator FCC about the management of its digital voice service and how it may put competing voice services running over Comcast’s network at a disadvantage. This has again sparked the net neutrality debate. We as a company offering traffic management gear are naturally interested in this matter. So should ISPs be allowed to offer a QoS-enhanced IP voice service? Read the rest of this entry »

Since the successful days of Napster, file sharing of copyright-protected material — particularly in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks — has been a serious threat to the established business models of the content industry. There have been numerous discussions about the real impact. Scientific papers show the whole range from negative to positive effects, or no effects at all. In my opinion, there are effects, indeed. Some of them are positive as file sharing can expose new music groups and authors to an audience. And some effects are negative as existing copyrights are definitely infringed to a huge extent in the net.

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In 2008, a number of North American ISPs have publicly announced bandwidth caps, most prominently Comcast and AT&T. While this may seem as a step backwards for broadband customers at first sight, it actually is an improvement of the situation of the previous years with hidden and inconsistent caps. In fact, a true all-you-can-download plan across the entire customer base of an ISP at current price tags is commercially impracticable, despite the oft-lamented lack of a “real” flat rate by “consumer advocates”. Usually they try to drive their argument home by using everyday analogies such as monthly public transport travel passes, that also come with no usage limit. That analogy is of course totally flawed. Just as transportation authorities rely on the fact that physical presence in their vehicles is limited by natural means (Who on earth has allowed that camp site on our train?), every ISP has an oversubscription ratio without which no one would be able to pay for high-speed Internet access.

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We are often asked where the name ipoque comes from or what it stands for. The truth is: all possible names (like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft etc.) were taken already. Even Apple was used by another company. So, the only names remaining were Sauerkraut or ipoque. Anyway, in my opinion, a cool name must have at least one x, y or q in it. Et voilà: we chose ipoque. The name is derived from the French époque and Klaus likes the neighborhood to Belle Époque – as it was an era of great scientific and technological advancement in Europe.

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Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a controversial technology and has become a red flag for privacy protection activists. Particularly the debate between US cable operator Comcast and the government regulator FCC has attracted much media attention and contributed to the discredit of DPI. The FCC says in its Memorandum Opinion and Order against Comcast:

“[…] Comcast opens its customers’ mail because it wants to deliver mail not based on the address or type of stamp on the envelope but on the type of letter contained therein.”

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Admittedly, “X percent of the Internet is P2P” makes for a great headline and is an effective way to generate publicity. It would be dishonest to deny this was the reason ipoque started its Internet studies in 2006. It is, at the same time, a great opportunity to demonstrate the own capabilities. If the equipment can detect and measure it, it is able to control it. Other equipment vendors have released similar studies, and analyst companies even try to make money with such studies. In the past two months only, three Internet studies with a particular focus on P2P traffic have been published, and ipoque’s Internet Study 2008 will be released by the end of the year.

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Technically, the latest encryption and obfuscation enhancements of BitTorrent, the currently most popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing network, deserve respect. They come in the form of extensions to certain BitTorrent clients such as Vuze and BitComet, and they make life for deep packet inspection (DPI) vendors like us more difficult. Detection signatures have become more complex thus requiring more processing power.

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Last week I chaired a workshop on Internet piracy at the Broadband World Forum Europe in Brussels. Its title was “Pirates of the Net – Challenges and Solutions for Digital Content Distribution”. Our goal was to bring together representatives of the involved parties, who rarely meet in the real world: content providers, Internet service providers (ISPs), legislators, technologists and facilitators of gray market content distribution.

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