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Please contact:
Jeff Claudino
Director of Sales, Insider Research Services
619-229-9940
or via email at:
claudino@lightreading.com |
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| Deep Packet Inspection: Taming the P2P Traffic Beast |
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The continued growth in peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic presents increasing problems for broadband service providers. Internet service providers (ISPs) do not generate any revenue from delivering P2P traffic to their subscribers, and smaller ISPs face considerable peering costs when P2P traffic goes off-net. Even for ISPs large enough to cover these costs, P2P drives increasing traffic loads, requiring additional capex for no additional revenue. Moreover, a minority of users generating large quantities of P2P traffic can degrade performance for the majority of broadband subscribers using less-intensive applications such as email or Web browsing. Poor network performance increases customer churn, leading to a decline in service revenues.
Deep packet inspection (DPI) technology has emerged from the enterprise world into service provider networks to help mitigate the impact of P2P. According to most vendors, initial uptake of DPI was fastest in Asia, where problems with P2P traffic and high off-net traffic had been most severe. European broadband providers were also early adopters of DPI, but for another reason: Due to high levels of competition from digital subscriber line (DSL) operators in many countries, service providers used DPI as a means to implement tiered service plans, to differentiate them from standard �all-you-can-eat" or "one-size-fits-all� data services.
In the U.S. market, multiple system operators (MSOs) were early adopters of the technology. This is because MSOs faced greater challenges than DSL providers in the last mile. For MSOs, last-mile bandwidth is shared among users, whereas in a DSL network a dedicated link is established for each subscriber. Smaller DSL operators were generally early adopters of DPI, as they suffered most from P2P-generated off-net traffic and peering costs. Recently, vendors note an increase in the level of request for proposal activity from large wireline and wireless operators in the U.S. It appears that several operators are looking to deploy DPI in tandem with their IPTV deployments in 2007.
This report focuses on products that specifically provide or use real-time data and analysis of packet contents for stateful protocol identification, flow monitoring, application monitoring, session monitoring, policy enforcement, use and usage control, quality of service, security, and traffic management. Although such DPI is a fundamental technique of service control that can be applied in many types of products, this report focuses on those vendors and products that emphasize packet inspection and analysis.
The report provides an overview of P2P�s impact on data networks and details how DPI can be deployed to minimize those effects. It presents the market positioning of DPI vendors and provides a detailed comparison of product features. It also lists customer wins for the vendors in this sector and catalogs technology partnerships each vendor has struck with suppliers of related hardware and software. Finally, it projects market size data for the DPI sector through 2010 and provides detailed analysis of each vendor�s DPI solution portfolio.
Deep Packet Inspection: Taming the P2P Traffic Beast provides critical insight and analysis for a range of industry participants, including:
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Telecom operators now planning or deploying DPI technologies |
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DPI technology suppliers assessing the potential size of the market opportunity |
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Investors needing a better understanding of the scale of the opportunity that the DPI sector presents |
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| Sample research data from the report is shown in the excerpts below: |
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 Table of Contents (lri0806toc.pdf) |
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| DPI technology identifies and classifies data packets at wire speed. DPI functionality goes beyond Layer 7 awareness to enable deep analysis of static and dynamic protocols, application signatures, content patterns, and session behavior such as connections per second. This visibility is the key to controlling and optimizing IP service delivery. The following figure presents the basic market positioning for DPI and traffic management vendors. |
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| [click on the image above for the full excerpt] |
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| Although cable MSOs were early buyers of DPI technology in the U.S., there is growing evidence that telecom operators are becoming more aggressive in DPI deployment. The following figure shows the comparative customer mix for one DPI vendor in 2005 and 2006. More than 50 vendors are now offering SIP infrastructure and servers, SIP applications, and complementary networking technologies such as session border controllers, systems for firewall and NAT traversal, and gateways. |
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| [click on the image above for the full excerpt] |
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 Companies profiled in this report include: Allot Communications Ltd.; Caspian Networks Inc.; Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO); Ellacoya Networks Inc.; Narus Inc.; and Sandvine Corp. (London: SAND). |
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| Total pages: 28 |
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| To view reports you will need Adobe's Acrobat Reader. If you do not have it, it can be obtained for free at the Adobe web site. |
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