Device awareness is being talked about more and more amongst service providers today, particularly by those offering mobile data. What is it? Similar to location awareness, device awareness is visibility into what devices are on the network, what impact they are having on network resources and at what times of the day. Visibility to this data allows service providers to better understand how devices are impacting the network and offers the opportunity to better manage capex and opex while continuing to maintain a high quality of experience for their subscribers.

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At this year’s Broadband World Forum Europe, in Paris Oct26-28^th, Sandvine had the opportunity to speak on the topic of “10 years of DPI – what will the next decade bring”.   CEO, Dave Caputo, illustrated that “an unmanaged network is not neutral” by using the Internet highway analogy.  Long, wide transport trucks can block highways to the detriment of small, efficient cars or even emergency vehicles.  The ability to prioritize traffic based on the type of application is a necessity not just for roads, but also for the Internet.

However, the applicability of DPI does not stop with traffic management.  As someone in the thick of the industry, it continually surprises me that the general audience still sidelines deep packet inspection as a traffic management technology.  Times have moved on.  The fine-granularity protocol identification has been augmented by subscriber awareness, as well as by network topology knowledge which includes the location of access resource congestion.  Add on to that the ability to determine which devices are actually demanding the most bandwidth, and you have a powerful system.  Such a network policy control system enables service providers to understand the broadband usage on their networks and to implement differentiated service plans, to monetize their infrastructure and to proactively stay one step ahead of meeting consumer demands.

Network Analytics, based on credible traffic data, provides an explicit graphical view of how policy control can touch and improve every aspect of the service provider business.  It was a lot of fun demonstrating this tool to prospects during the BBWF tradeshow and seeing their reaction to the performance indicators and trending graphs.  A picture is indeed worth a thousand words!