Broadband World Forum Europe 2009:
DPI — The End of the Internet?
September 14th, 2009 by Klaus Mochalski
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”.
The vendors unanimously emphasized the fact that DPI is merely an enabling technology, and that the debate should focus more on the specific applications of DPI technology. In my presentation, I focused on Internet traffic management, where DPI is used for protocol and application classification. The slides are available for download (PDF, 1MB). A comprehensive discussion of this topic can be found in our white paper “Deep Packet Inspection – Technology, Applications & Net Neutrality“.
Particularly interesting was the service provider’s perspective presented by Didier Duriez of Orange France. He sees many potential needs for DPI technology, but puts their deployment more in the future, at least for European providers, where the main areas of interest would be security, QoS delivery and fair usage policies in the mobile domain.
We have used the occasion to release OpenDPI, an open source version of our commercial DPI engine. Our motivation for this move was the improvement of transparency of DPI systems and the DPI industry in general.
Tags: Broadband World Forum, deep packet inspection, dpi, net neutrality, OpenDPI