Perhaps if the creators of the technology known as deep-packet inspection had better marketing gurus around them when they introduced it to the world, they would have begun with the more innocuous term “deep-packet capture” and avoided, or delayed, the current paranoid backlash until they had firmly established the technology and its benefits. As it is, providers of DPI technology must overcome not only tough market conditions, but critics with a huge buzzword on their side: privacy.
Some worrywarts have taken to calling the technology “deep-privacy invasion” and wish to curtail its use. Two things make theirs a losing battle: first, the incessant demand for faster speeds, ubiquitous access and content rich data at the highest levels of service quality requires it; second, consumers of the Internet and Internet-based services, to say nothing of consumers in the brick-and-mortar world, have clearly demonstrated a willingness to trade privacy for a few coupons and targeted marketing.
For mobile and broadband services to become what people want them to become in the future, according to a recent study by Oracle and The Future Laboratory in the UK, which includes the sci-fi-like synthetic assistant as well as digitally augmented realities, network providers will need to know our every whim and desire, so to speak. And since consumers aren’t willing to foot the bill for all this digital wizardry, advertisers will have to step in to fund it and accelerate the carefree relinquishing of personal data.
According to the Oracle study “Capitalizing on the Digital Age,” advertisers are more than happy to step in. In the U.K., for example, advertisers for the first time have spent more for online advertising that they have for television in the first half of 2009. Digital advertising grew by 4.6 percent to 1.75 billion Euros.
But all the advertising support and nifty gadgets, all the ingenuous applications, ubiquitous access and high speeds are for naught without the capability to ensure a quality user experience – which is becoming increasingly difficult given service complexity.
And if network service providers have learned anything lately from the outrageous demand for their offerings, it’s that network quality really does matter. It seems that network operators had become so good at managing the quality of their networks that they allowed marketers to convince them that all the other key performance indicators for a quality customer experience were on par with network quality. As it turns out, service providers really are in the technology business after all. Just ask AT&T.
Being first to truly drive mobile data usage with the iPhone, AT&T has relearned some valuable lessons about managing network capacity and quality and troubleshooting its network.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson recently said, “If you look at reasons for churn in our industry, the Number 1 reason is network quality.”
And while the company said in March that it planned to invest $17 billion to $18 billion in 2009, two-thirds of which is for extending and enhancing the company's wireless and wired broadband networks to provide more coverage, speed and capacity, infrastructure investment only goes so far.
