Allot combines DPI, caching in MediaSwift

Allot Communications (NASDAQ: ALLT) today announced a new service that combines its deep packet inspection (DPI) technology with caching to add intelligence to video and media delivery and enable revenue-generating IP video services. Allot’s new MediaSwift service lets IP service providers offer a guaranteed quality of experience (QoE) for video services and helps them more efficiently cope with the growing flood of IP video traffic.

“There is a 300% traffic increase expected by 2012, and most of that is driven by video,” said Jonathon Gordon, director of marketing for Allot. “Video will constitute up to 90% of the Web traffic within two years. Our solution is about showing how to optimize video across the network but also about how service providers can increase the quality of experience to the subscriber and look at options for generating increased revenues off this type of traffic.”

By caching content closer to the customer, service providers can eliminate the repeated backhauling of that video traffic to a large number of customers. By combining DPI with caching, Allot enables the rapid identification of video traffic that suddenly spikes in popularity and enable that content to be cached at the service provider location, using the combination of MediaSwift and Allot’s Service Gateway and NetExplorer systems.

“We saw a similar phenomenon with peer-to-peer traffic that we are now seeing with video,” Gordon said. “Service providers are trying to understand how to cope with that much traffic without having to spend umpteen more dollars on their infrastructure. But video adds quite a few additional complexities than what peer-to-peer creates. First, it reaches a much wider audience, so the content has to be available everywhere. Also, video is a real-time experience where peer-to-peer isn’t, so there are certain expectations attached to watching a video. And video is real-time. People may realize that the quality is a little less, but they don’t expect it to stop and start and be garbled.”

By enabling the real-time identification of content, video or P2P that needs to be cached, MediaSwift keeps copies of the content much closer to the user, which improves the quality of experience over the available bandwidth, Gordon said. “DPI can detect on the fly and tell you what content is actually cache-able, because there are many applications on the Internet which are not,” Gordon said. “If you are caching everything, you are wasting resources as opposed to saving them.”

MediaSwift has an algorithm that takes into account a variety of criteria, including file size and popularity, to determine what to cache, Gordon said. “The melding of DPI with caching provides a win-win to the provider themselves and to the subscriber,” he said.

Service providers can choose to monetize that by offering a higher level service at a higher cost or use MediaSwift to build customer loyalty and reduce churn, Gordon said.

Allot has deployed MediaSwift with an Allot service gateway user – an unnamed tier-one service provider that wanted to reduce congestion and the need for frequent upgrades to their access link speeds while improving the quality of customer experience to reduce churn. The customer had 19 points of presence in multiple cities and nine regions, Gordon said. Allot was able to deploy dedicated QoS and media caching at access points within the network, and leveraging DPI to redirect and cache content – mainly P2P and HTTP video – the provider was able to save 40% of access capacity by caching 30% of its IP content.

“What this customer is planning in the future is to implement caching/acceleration on a per subscriber-application basis in commercially tiered quality-of-experience packages,” Gordon said.

MediaSwift is immediately available, Gordon said, and Allot is in discussion with other service providers as well.