Online business Toolkit

Story: Deep packet inspection: What you should know

• 
• 

Now I know what my ISP is using

Interesting article. My own ISP, Eclipse (part of Kingston Communications), has recently introduced a traffic monitoring and management service for subscribers, which I now recognise must be using DPI.

The Eclipse implementation looks to me to be benign, and actually quite helpful to subscribers. They divide traffic into 6 categories - web, email, FTP, gaming, P2P & VPN.

My contract gives me a monthly bandwidth cap, and I can use the account web page to monitor my usage on a daily basis, according to these categories. I can also tune the priorities for my own connection by these categories, e.g. if I want P2P to be max. priority (not that I do!) I can set it that way.

This seems to me a sensible and useful application of DPI for the benefit of broadband consumers. The downside is the obvious possibility for misuse in the wrong hands (which could well include governments).

Rick Jones

• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

Full Talkback thread