Broadband traffic management

When talking about mobile internet technologies there are new technology terms emerging almost on a weekly bases. Today im going to wrestle with the »Broadband Traffic Management« and explain its meaning, origins, business case and usage.

Since the introduction of early broadband technologies providers forced themselves into a rat race to zero for customers. This meant lowering the prices of their services, increasing the access speeds until ridiculously high speeds with no data caps were offered for relatively small amounts of money. This trend was also copy pasted to the mobile internet world which is, make notice, even more expensive to maintain and upgrade. Then as the number of the customers increased, and the content providers blossomed, customers were actually enabled to make use of the bandwidth they received from their ISPs. And then the problems appeared.

You see, ISP did not really count that all of their customers were going to use all of their bandwidth all of the time, or most of the time. They had a simple calculation of around 1/20 oversubscription in the access. But they did not tell the customers that. It means that if everybody decides to uses their bandwidth at the same time, it is going to cause a big congestion. And the customers do not like congestions, because they expect to get what they paid for.

In order to resolve newly emerged challenges, ISPs had to choose between few things:

a) Completely upgrade their equipment to satisfy all the customers at current terms

b) Explain to the customers that they can’t provide them what they paid for

c) Take a step back , evaluate what customers are using and start introducing new services which charge the customers based on how much data they actually use and at the same time cut off the old tariff plans

You guessed right, the ISP opted for c, as the other two options would probably put them out of business. And here is where we got the Broadband Traffic Management. ISP used the available technologies to check the usage pattern of their customers, and discovered that not all the customers are the same, not all the customers have same needs, and not all applications are equally important to different customers. And voile, business case for Broadband Traffic Management emerged. Let me get this straight, it is not a technology itself (at least not in my book). I would rather call it solution enabled by few different technologies. Two most important are DPI (deep packet inspection) and Policy Management and Control, where DPI are usually hardware boxes which inspect packets up to layer 7, and Policy Management and Control is software which tells then what to do with what type of traffic for a particular user.

I hope Broadband Traffic Management is less cloudy for you after this post. Regarding the DPI and Policy Management, please stay tuned.

Cisco Service Control Engine 3.6 software

Well this is not really new but i thought it could be interesting. There is new software for Cisco Service Control Engine. Software version is 3.6. Here are the release notes. What did we see as a biggest change and what are customers asking us. Support for Gx and Gy interfaces for sure. For the first time Cisco SCE supports not only SCE API or SCE Sniffer but also Gx and Gy interfaces. Configuration wise it does not change awfull lot because its just another interface, however challenges could be in integration with PCRF policy managers because everything is still fresh. And off course there are still the old considerations like packages definition, implementation of Fair Usage Policies, and integration into existing network (did anyone mention Cisco 7600 load balancing).

Bill Shock prevention

Recently the EU passed the bill on bill shock prevention. In a nutshell it states that when roaming, customers need to be informed when they spend certain amount of money (50 E), and only after they accept that fact they can roam some more. Main idea was to avoid situations like this.

The question is - what do you need to implement such kind of regulative if you are an EU based SP. We had the opportunity to implement few solutions like this and speaking from Cisco perspective (which is our bread and butter) you need a Cisco CSG2 (Content Services Gateway) and a PCRF Policy Manager . It could also work on other solutions (ASR 5000 and/or Cisco Service Control Engine).

And off course you need a team of capable network consultants who are going to make sure that everything works well :)

Smartphones

As we are not only the creators of New Generation Networks but also users, we need to have the latest and greatest what technology has to offer.

Here is a direct clash of two currently most popular. Due to local preferences and prices of my local SP, i am leaning towards HTC.

Traffic Management

As i mentioned the "all you can it" data plans are much under the inspection of Network Service Providers which obviously want to move away from them. Here as an excellent article from our CTO Ivan Pepelnjak with some sound and rational suggestions how to handle traffic management in broadband networks.

To DPI or not to DPI

Few years ago term DPI (deep packet internet) was more connected to security than it was to Internet access. However as the products and market evolved i would say that the question is not any more "to do it, or not do it" but the question is rather when and how. DPI devices are showing increasing technology maturity, and Network Service Providers (especially mobile ones) are showing increasing degree of acceptance.

What we did so far (as a company which does technology enablement) is around 25 Service Provider implementations of DPI devices (atm we work only with Cisco Service Control Engine). Initial drive for DPI was throtling P2P traffic on the interconnection links, than the focus was shifted to fair usage policies, and nowadays DPI is mostly used for new services enablement in conjuction with different Policy Managment tools.

Which leads us to the questions of "all you can eat" quotas and net netrality but more on that on some other occasion!

Net Neutrality

Due to nature of my day to day work i encountered this term many, many times. For all of you who wants a quick refresher on the subject pls visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality.

The main concept is – keep the internet unregulated – no blocking, no shaping, no fiddling with traffic in any way and as fast as possible. My personal opinion is that the truth is somewhere in between, as there is a struggle between content providers (Google, Yahoo, etc..) and network providers (BT, AT&T, Orange, etc…) for the customers money. In case that content providers take the edge we are possibly facing drop in quality of access connection, as we know that a lot of technology fundamental research are funded by hardware companies (Cisco, Juniper, Erikson), and of course this hardware is bought by access providers (or Networking Service Providers) – kind of magic circle. In case that access providers take the edge we are facing once again possibility of having more expensive network access with limited content which is not good either.

This is especially true for Mobile Internet Data providers where internet access is much more expensive (because of the cost of the equipment), and its not that easy to provide unlimited data plans for bulk of people.