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Wednesday, 23 September 2009 17:30 |
 Traffic Management For Pennies On Every DSL Line
LSI's "Service-Aware" upgrades allow carriers to control and traffic manage every line at a cost that works out to pennies per month per subscriber. Their new software for the popular APP communications processors allows the DSLAM to control the services available to each subscriber. A chip to control 24 to 96 lines typically costs less than $100, perhaps $1-2/customer. Over four years of DSLAM life, that's four or five cents per month. The LSI division was formerly known as Agere and before that was part of Lucent Microelectronics.
I believe politics is only one reason Network Neutrality hasn't been abused often so far. Until now the equipment just didn't have the ability to do the line by line fine tuning required to selectively favor and disfavor. That limit is being rapidly overcome by LSI and half a dozen other vendors. Carriers will soon have the ability to do almost anything they want to maximize revenue from your line.
LSI's next-gen multicore processors will be designed to do full deep packet inspection and even more sophisticated traffic management.
This kind of processing power is a good thing if used to block malware, viruses, and denial of service attacks, so it makes sense to include it. The ability to slow down, prioritize, or completely block each line will typically be built in whether separately ordered or not.
LSI's future chips will feature Power PC CPUs, an advanced version of what already does wonders in my Sony Playstation, as well as numerous dedicated co-processors. That's enough power to block dis-favored applications, intercept transmission, limit the speed from a given host (slow down YouTube,) and "police" the line. They claim the new chips can run at line speed up to 20 gigabits. That's 400 users at a constant 50 megabit load. Per line, the chips will be attractively priced.
"This means you won't need any external traffic boxes. It will be built into the linecard near the DSL chip. Doing the control close to the customer has many advantages," Steve Vandris of LSI tells me. Sandvine, a leader in management gear, believes their equipment will continue to be crucial to most networks. Don Bowman writes "Network policy control is important to both fixed and mobile operators. DPI is merely an enabling technology. This is where many chip and integrated router vendors are missing the boat. It is unlikely an operator would see the ability to do aggregate traffic management per DSL line in the same vein as Sandvine." More, including IPv6, http://bit.ly/v9p1n > |
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Last Updated on Monday, 28 September 2009 11:42 |
