Good guys or bad guys?

Can a technology be inherently bad? Of course not. But it can be used for an ill purpose. And an ill purpose, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder (and sometimes the jury).

Take peer-to-peer technology, for instance. It's been around for a long time, but it was when Napster burst on the scene, followed by its many variants, that service providers became concerned about the sudden spike in peer-to-peer traffic and its ability to impact other applications. The only real legal issue concerning Napster, et al, involved the sharing of copyrighted material, but service providers needed a way to limit the bandwidth the expanding P2P networks could consume.

Their concerns lead to an interest in deep packet inspection technology, which is briefly explained on page 10. DPI devices enable service providers to both identify P2P traffic and limit its ability to consume network resources to the detriment of other traffic.

There are now some concerns being raised about DPI, however, and its ability to let service providers see exactly how customers are using Internet access services. I find this a fascinating topic, and I've begun exploring it in greater depth on our Web site — www.telephonyonline.com — because DPI is very much a part of the industry's future. It is increasingly being used to provide security, not only for service providers, but for their customers. For example, DPI is one of the methods Qwest Communications is using in its groundbreaking new service that alerts consumers when their PCs have been hacked or infected by viruses.

Because there are privacy concerns being raised by some consumer groups and a lot of wild claims being made on blogs about the use of DPI to do more dastardly things — such as block certain content or certain competitors' traffic — DPI has become a “topic non grata” for service providers. Within the last month, I've asked AT&T, Qwest and Verizon all about DPI, in different conversations and contexts, and found very little interest in the discussion.

This makes perfect sense. If you are using DPI to detect activity by hackers, spammers and other evildoers, you probably don't want to tell a reporter exactly what you are doing — no more than the police want to publish a map of speed traps or a list of sting operations in the local newspaper.

Reluctance to speak openly on a topic, however, can create the impression that a company has something to hide. There is likely to be more debate about the use of DPI, and the industry would be wise to determine what it should say about it.