What the telecom industry will do about DPI

One way Zeugma is avoiding the controversy around DPI is to limit what its product does in potentially controversial areas such as throttling peer-to-peer traffic. Other vendors “are probably doing a noble thing trying to identify peer-to-peer traffic, which is a moving target,” Walsh said. “We don’t do that -- we don’t do signature libraries for peer-to-peer. We are more focused on identifying traffic types and doing things that promote them, delivering the types of services that seemed to have passed scrutiny. It’s a little bit of political correctness and terminology because DPI is now a bad word to use, and that’s unfortunate.”

Other DPI vendors have also tried to use different terminology to describe their products, but as Peder Jungck, co-founder and CTO of CloudShield, pointed out, there are risks associated with merely renaming the technology.

“We can’t completely run away from the concept,” Jungck said. “The problem I have with running away from the words is, does that mean we are going to have a charade out there between us and consumers? Because consumers are bright, and they can figure out what is doing on. If all we do is come up with a new name, and people go on using it in exactly the same way, then we wind up with the same issues all over again. What needs to be established is, what are the appropriate things that service provides can do or not do?”

A number of DPI vendors have come together to create dpacket.org, a group and a Web site that seeks to offer public information about deep packet inspection, with the hopes of calming fears and showing what the technology can do. Among the founding sponsor companies are Allot Communications, Bivio Networks, Cloudshield, Ellacoya Networks (now part of Arbor Networks), LSI, Qosmos, Sandvine, and Solera Networks.