Pummeled by press and paranoia, deep-packet inspection technology has had to adapt. And indeed it has, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that people have adapted to it. Although calmer heads have prevailed, DPI was the original villain, besides Comcast, in earlier days of the net neutrality debate because of its ability to examine packets for the type of traffic it carried and potentially throttle it.
Truth be told, said Mark McIlvane, president and COO of Velocent Systems, “In our business, we don’t even see any of the content. We don’t have any idea what’s inside and we’re glad, because with all the security problems around the world, you don’t want to be looking at that stuff.”
With that, Velocent says it is out of the DPI business and prefers the term “deep packet capture.”
So what does Velocent look at and why is it different?
Velocent’s OneVu monitors every packet, about 5TB an hour’s worth, at the TCP/IP layer and uses the characteristics of the protocol itself to collect the metadata around quality, identity and location and other indicators from which it can extract useful performance and business information at a very granular level. It allows for unique measurements that provide visibility into cell route congestion, peak and average throughput, latency and cell route service classifications.
“In the old days they used to say that if you can’t bill for it you can’t sell it; now they’re saying that if you can’t measure it, you can’t sell it,” said Bruce Peterson, CEO of Velocent.
Peterson said he understands operators’ concern that they already have too much data to analyze at from all the probes they have in the network. “I say speed and delay will define service levels going forward and mobile operators are engaged with their customers to deliver a certain level of throughput, but none of those probe vendors have the ability to provide true speed and delay measurements. We are the only ones that can get to the granularity required to measure true throughput,” he said.
Besides, he said, at the end of the day no one can really afford to probe everywhere in the network. “You have to hope you’re probing where the problem is. And even if you are you might not see what’s going on inside the pipe,” Peterson said.
Because it collects up to 5TB per hour with the ability to do more, Velocent has been able to incorporate predictive analysis to aid troubleshooting. “We are creating historical views of what is happening in the network every five minutes of every day and that gives operators a way of knowing how the network should be flowing, and if it isn’t, that points to a problem,” McIlvane said.
Through this analysis comes one of Velocent’s bigger selling points: the ability to identify silent problems that otherwise operators have not been able to identify. Velocent calls this “eliminating the blind spots.”
The realities of mobile data have reminded operators that network quality is a strong determinant of churn. The challenge is in measuring that quality. Velocent monitors network Layers 2 through 7, but says that keys to quality can be found in Layers 3 and 4 where the transaction control protocol and the user datagram protocols flow. OneVu collects the data to satisfy 130 key performance indicators and can aggregate them in key quality indicators. 3 UK generates more than 140 million measurement records per day, 20 of them in real-time.
To read the full, in-depth article on our sister site, Billing & OSS World, about how two European companies are using Volecent’s DPI tool, click here or on the source link below.
