Wearing an eyepatch (I’m having a little eye trouble) has given me new appreciation for the importance of visibility. There’s some good news coming out on that front; as company Ipoque has released an open-source deep packet inspection client. It’s slower than commercial offerings – more of a tech demo than anything else, but the idea isn’t so much to provide DPI for the masses as it is to show the masses exactly what DPI is, instead of relying on rumor. Ipoque doesn’t store or examine information being transmitted, for example, a common fear regarding DPI.
Now, there are products that do packet capture and analysis– we even sell one for the enterprise IT environment. But it would be chilling, at the very least, to use a product that inspects the content, rather than protocol, of information being transmitted for University or public ISP internet connections. Still, knowing what protocols are running at any particular time is very useful for even public and university Internet connections. If World of Warcraft connections and VoIP took a larger share of the network bandwidth than large Web/FTP downloads and YouTube, it’s an easy choice to focus network improvements on solutions that decrease latency rather than those that would increase latency but improve throughput.
Of course, all the DPI and network monitoring in the world can’t help some networks.
For example, Telkom, in South Africa, provides ADSL service. Apparently, it’s not exactly the speediest service in the world, as Unlimited IT decided to transfer 4GB worth of data over 60 miles in one of two ways – via ADSL, or via carrier USB-stick connected to a carrier pigeon.
The pigeon took two hours – including the time it took to load the data onto the computer from the USB flash memory stick. During that time, the ADSL transmission was about 4% complete. It wasn’t even close.
Just doing some math here – 4% of 4GB is 163.84MB… that’s 81.92MB/hr, or 1.365MB/min, or 23.3kBps. Yep, sounds about right. That’s one of the major problems with ADSL… the “A” part. That 23.3kBps is around 186kbps – which is actually not that bad compared to the 256kbps upload speed on most ADSL providers. But the policy of providing download speeds vastly greater than upload speeds was created in an era where people overwhelmingly downloaded information from the Internet, and large uploads were rare, and usually done by large corporations. Now, we have YouTube, Flickr, anyone in the world can contribute to open source projects, etc. Might be time to consider changing those policies.
Or someone could make a ton of money providing an upload-only service to compliment the download-focused services of ADSL and cable providers. Food for thought.
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