The Indispensable Deep-Packet Inspection

That lesson, which Velocent CEO Bruce Peterson agrees with, is that network quality is key to customer experience. “More capable troubleshooting tools will be required to maintain service levels on next generation networks,” he said. .

While DPI, or DPC, may get some competition in this area from a technical perspective as alternatives to DPI make their case, the privacy argument alone won’t stand up.

One such competitor is Accedian Networks. Scott Sumner, its vice president of marketing makes the case here for the company’s version of bandwidth control. However, he makes two assumptions that most DPI vendors would challenge: The first is that the primary tactic of DPI is to throttle traffic. Although this is how the technology was initially utilized in some high profile cases, its primary function is to capture and inspect packets. There are other ways it can and is being used. The second is that customer quality-of-service and efficient networks are necessarily competing demands. They are not. A truly efficient network can actually boost QoS.

Peterson said his Naperville, Il-based company’s aim since its inception in 2005 has been network quality and he’s extended that to customer experience management. To emphasize that he finally gave his test-box sounding VSE 2000 a more functional name that reflects the capabilities of the product. It’s called OneVu. In English, that’s what it tries to do– give one view of the end-to-end customer experience.

“As volumes increase, everything changes in the network and when things change, there are always opportunities for problems. But you have to have visibility before you can have control,” he said.

He added that only deep packet capture, his euphemism for DPI, can provide the session by session, user by user view of the true customer experience. He also said that the true measure of CEM comes from the user plane and not the control plane of the network where some other solutions work, including those that look at signaling data.

OneVu is a non-intrusive packet capture solution that captures a copy of each packet at multi-gigabit speeds at the most aggregated point inside the mobile network. Peterson said it provides visibility into five key areas on a wireless network: cell route congestion, peak throughput, mobile network latency, service drop detection and traffic classification.

It monitors layers 2 through 7 and utilizes layers 3 and 4 IP transport packets to generate end-to-end views of the entire network. Velocent uses this technology to enable four applications: service quality management, customer experience management, new product management and cell backhaul optimization. Since its launch, the company has added user-friendly features such as moving geographic information systems and a customer experience view GUI to make the complex DPI data available to more people within operations.

Velocent has several business cases, which B/OSS will review in future articles.