When is Deep Packet Inspection a Good Thing?

March 26, 2009 — netequalizer

Commentary

Update September 2011

Seems some shareholders  of a company who over promised layer 7 technology are not happy.

By Eli Riles

As many of our customers are aware, we publicly stated back in October 2008 that we officially had switched all of our bandwidth control solutions over to behavior-based shaping. Consequently, we  also completely disavowed Deep Packet Inspection in a move that has Ars Technica described as “vendor throws deep packet inspection under the bus.”

In the last few weeks, there has been a barrage of attacks on Deep Packet Inspection, and then a volley of PR supporting it from those implementing the practice.

I had been sitting on an action item to write something in defense of DPI, and then this morning I came across a pro-DPI blog post in the New York Times. The following excerpt is in reference to using DPI to give priority to certain types of traffic such as gaming:

“Some customers will value what they see as low priority as high priority,” he said. I asked Mr. Scott what he thought about the approach of Plusnet, which lets consumers pay more if they want higher priority given to their game traffic and downloads. Surprisingly, he had no complaints.

“If you said to me, the consumer, ‘You can choose what applications to prioritize and which to deprioritize, and, oh, by the way, prices will change as a result of how you do this,’ I don’t have a problem with that,” he said.

The key to this excerpt is the phrase, “IF YOU ASK THE CONSUMER WHAT THEY WANT.” This implies permission. If you use DPI as an opt-in , above-board technology, then obviously there is nothing wrong with it. The threat to privacy is only an issue if you use DPI without consumer knowledge. It should not be up to the provider to decide appropriate use of DPI,  regardless of good intent.

The quickest way to deflate the objections  of the DPI opposition is to allow consumers to choose. If you subscribe to a provider that allows you to have higher priority for certain application, and it is in their literature, then by proxy you have granted permission to monitor your traffic. I can still see the Net Neutrality purist unhappy with any differential service, but realistically I think there is a middle ground.

I read an article the other day where a defender of DPI practices (sorry no reference) pointed out how spam filtering is widely accepted and must use DPI techniques to be effective. The part the defender again failed to highlight was that most spam filtering is done as an opt-in with permission. For example, the last time I checked my Gmail account, it gave the option to turn the spam filter off.

In sum, we are fully in support of DPI technology when the customer is made aware of its use and has a choice to opt out. However, any use of DPI done unknowingly and behind the scenes is bound to create controversy and may even be illegal. The exception would be a court order for a legal wiretap. Therefore, the Deep Packet Inspection debate isn’t necessarily a black and white case of two mutually exclusive extremes of right and wrong. If done candidly, DPI can be beneficial to both the Internet user and provider.

See also what is deep packet inspection.

Eli Riles, a consultant for APconnections (Netequalizer), is a retired insurance agent from New York. He is a self-taught expert in network infrastructure. He spends half the year traveling and visiting remote corners of the earth. The other half of the year you’ll find him in his computer labs testing and tinkering with the latest network technology.

For questions or comments, please contact him at eliriles@yahoo.com.

Posted in Bandwidth Management, Commentary and Editorials. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 6 Comments »

New Speed Test Tools from M-Lab Expose ISP Bandwidth Throttling Practices

March 21, 2009 — netequalizer

In a recent article, we wrote about the “The White Lies ISPs tell about their bandwidth speeds“.  We even hinted at how they (your ISP)  might be inclined to give preferential treatment to normal speed test sites.  Well, now there is a speed test site from M-Lab that goes beyond simple speed tests. M-lab gives the consumer sophisticated results and exposes any tricks your ISP might be up to.

Features provided include:

  • Network Diagnostic Tool – Test your connection speed and receive sophisticated diagnosis of problems limiting speed.
  • Glasnost – Test whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled.
  • Network Path and Application Diagnosis – Diagnose common problems that impact last-mile broadband networks.
  • DiffProbe (coming soon) – Determine whether an ISP is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic.
  • NANO (coming soon) – Determine whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations.

Click here to learn more about M-Lab.

Related article on how to determine your true video speed over the Internet.

Posted in Bandwidth Monitoring, Network Speed, News. Tags: , , , , , . 5 Comments »

NetEqualizer Coming Attractions and Features

March 17, 2009 — netequalizer

You heard it here first. Here is some of what is eminent in our pipeline. Due out in April 2009!

High end system improvements — The NE3000 – 1 gig  is currently undergoing load testing to validate 20,000 subscribers. For tier-2 ISPs and larger institutions, this is a welcome addition. There is nothing out there with this performance level that touches us on price. We have recently taken orders for several small national ISPs  in the Caribbean that  arelooking to cut their costs without sacrificing quality.

Top speed of these new high-end systems is 900 megabits up and 900 megabits down at the same time for a total of 1.8 megabits sustained.

More intelligence to effectively reign in rogue applications and P2P — Working with a couple of our large university customers, we have come up with some improvements to our behavior-based techniques used to battle P2P (without compromising privacy).  We now have a connection-limit feature that allows you to set a fixed connection limit for all IP’s on a particular subnet. We also have a smart script that will seek out your highest connection customers and set more stringent rate limits on them.

Faster start up time — For those users implementing pools, you are likely aware that it takes a few minutes for the NetEqualizer to fully come in on line. In our next release, we have reduced this time from minutes to seconds.

For more details on these features, please feel free to contact us.

Posted in New Features. Tags: , , , . Leave a Comment »

NetEqualizer March 2009 Contest Winner

March 9, 2009 — netequalizer

frontier

Every few months, we have a drawing to give away two roundtrip domestic airline tickets from Frontier Airlines to one lucky person who’s recently tried out our online NetEqualizer demo. The time has come to announce this round’s winner.

And the winner is…John Shoff of Reality Bytes Inc.

About John Shoff (Courtesy of http://www.realitybytesinc.com/)

I am a long term resident of Drumheller, Alberta.  I was born and raised in Drumheller and have lived in the town for most of my adult life.

At a fairly young age, I developed a huge interest in computers, and basically everything electronic in nature.  I was intrigued by a device that could do so much, yet is so commonly misunderstood.

I feel that my interest in computers was the main reason for starting this company, and first and formost our goal is to stay on the leading edge of what technology can do.  In this industry more than any other, a few months of neglect can lead to a significant loss in the understanding of what the industry is doing, and where the industry is heading.

I spend a large portion of my “free” time dedicating myself to research and development of the latest trend or gadget in the technology sector.

I do however have many other passions.  Growing up, I was very much into hockey and other sports.  I was involved in Drumheller Minor Hockey for many years, and I am glad to see Drumheller Minor hockey developing, especially now with Drumheller having a Junior A hockey team.

Travel is a huge interest of mine, and I have been to a lot of the globe already, but that still amounts to only a small percentage of where I still have yet to go.  I find the different cultures across our planet have a lot to teach us.  In North America in general, and specifically I find in Alberta, we are a very driven culture, set to push the limits of what our body can handle in terms of stress load, and work load.  It has been a real eye opening experience to see how some other very different cultures interact.

If I had to describe myself in a few words, I would say I am very driven, compassionate, and open minded.  In regards to the latter, it cannot be said enough that the more we learn, the more we realize that we truely understand very little.

John Shoff is a proud member in good standing of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and has been involved with PCs and computer network design for over 10 years.

Posted in Contests. Tags: , . Leave a Comment »

Tucson Unified School District Could Use a Bandwidth Controller

March 8, 2009 — netequalizer

The excerpt below from the Arizona Star Daily sums up the network gridlock  situation at the Tucson Unified School Distirct.  The reason for posting this on our blog is the hope that other administrators will find us before they go out and commit to the recurring costs of additional expensive bandwidth.

At Fruchthendler Elementary School, one first-grade teacher was supposed to give an online assessment, only to find it took 10 minutes to load each question. She finally gave up and printed out the tests.

“We are a 21st-century school running on 20th-century bandwidth,” Little said. “I feel like I’m back to what I had in high school, which is pretty much nothing.”

Read the full Article from the Arizona Stqr Daily

Although we have no other details about the situation in Tucson  and their gridlocked Internet service, we are confident that an affordably priced 21st century bandwidth control solution could certainly make a difference.

NetEqualizer is being used in school districts across the country and has been largely effective in preventing many of the problems experienced in Tucson. Click here for feedback and reviews from just a few of the school districts that have deployed NetEqualizer.

Posted in Testimonials. Tags: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

The pros and cons of Disk (Web) Caching

March 3, 2009 — netequalizer

Eli Riles an independent consultant and former VP of sales for NetEqualizer has extensively investigated the subject of caching with many of  ISPs from around the globe. What follows are some useful observations on disk/web caching.

Effective use of Disk Caching

Suppose you are the administrator for a network, and you have a group of a 1000 users that wake up promptly at 7:00 am each morning and immediately go to MSNBC.com to retrieve the latest news from Wall Street. This synchronized behavior would create 1000 simultaneous requests for the same remote page on the Internet.

Or, in the corporate world, suppose the CEO of a multinational 10,000 employee business, right before the holidays put out an all points 20 page PDF file on the corporate site describing the new bonus plan? As you can imagine all the remote WAN links might get bogged down for hours while each and every employee tried to download this file.

Well it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if somehow the MSNBC home page could be stored locally on an internal server that would alleviate quite a bit of pressure on your WAN or Internet link.

And in the case of the CEO memo, if a single copy of the PDF file was placed locally at each remote office it would alleviate the rush of data.

Local Disk Caching does just that.

Offered by various vendors Caching can be very effective in many situations, and vendors can legitimately make claims of tremendous WAN speed improvement in some situations. Caching servers have built in intelligence to store the most recently and most frequently requested information, thus preventing future requests from traversing the WAN link unnecessarily .

You may know that most desktop browsers do their own form caching already. Many web servers keep a time stamp of their last update to data , and browsers such as the popular Internet Explorer will use a cached copy of a remote page after checking the time stamp.

So what is the downside of caching?

There are two main issues that can arise with caching:

1) Keeping the cache current. If you access a cache page that is not current then you are at risk of getting old and incorrect information. Some things you may never want to be cached, for example the results of a transactional database query. It’s not that these problems are insurmountable, but there is always the risk that the data in cache will not be synchronized with changes.

2) Volume. There are some 100 millions of web sites out on the Internet alone. Each site contains upwards of several megabytes of public information. The amount of data is staggering and even the smartest caching scheme cannot account for the variation in usage patterns among users and the likely hood they will hit an un-cached page. If you have a diverse set of users it is unlikely the Cache will have much effect on a given day

Formal definition of Caching

Posted in Caching and Video, Commentary and Editorials. Tags: , , , , . 3 Comments »

Hotel Property Managers Should Consider Generic Bandwidth Control Solutions

March 1, 2009 — netequalizer

Editors Note: The following Hotelsmag.com article caught my attention this morning. The hotel industry is now seriously starting to understand that they need some form of bandwidth control.   However, many hotel solutions for bandwidth control are custom marketed, which perhaps puts their economy-of-scale at a competitive disadvantage. Yet, the NetEqualizer bandwidth controller, as well as our competitors, cross many market verticals, offering hotels an effective solution without the niche-market costs. For example, in addition to the numerous other industries in which the NetEqualizer is being used, some of our hotel customers include: The Holiday Inn Capital Hill, a prominent Washington DC hotel; The Portola Plaza Hotel and Conference Center in Monterrey, California; and the Hotel St. Regis in New York City.

For more information about the NetEqualizer, or to check out our live demo, visit www.netequalizer.com.

Heavy Users Tax Hotel Systems:Hoteliers and IT Staff Must Adapt to a New Reality of Extreme Bandwidth Demands

By Stephanie Overby, Special to Hotels — Hotels, 3/1/2009

The tweens taking up the seventh floor are instant-messaging while listening to Internet radio and downloading a pirated version of “Twilight” to watch later. The 200-person meeting in the ballroom has a full interactive multimedia presentation going for the next hour. And you do not want to know what the businessman in room 1208 is streaming on BitTorrent, but it is probably not a productivity booster.

To keep reading, click here.

Posted in Commentary and Editorials, News. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Net Neutrality Defined,Barack Obama is on the bandwagon

February 27, 2009 — netequalizer

By Art Reisman, CTO, http://www.netequalizer.com

Art Reisman CTO www.netequalizer.com

Art Reisman

There continues to be a flurry of Net Neutrality articles published and according to one, Barack Obama is a big supporter of Net Neutrality.  Of course that was a fleeting campaign soundbite that the media picked up without much context.

I was releived to see that finally a politically entity put a definition on Net Neutrality.

From the government of Norway we get:

“The new rules lay out three guidelines. First, Internet users must be given complete and accurate information about the service they are buying, including capacity and quality. Second, users are allowed to send and receive content of their choice, use services and applications of their choice. and connect any hardware and software that doesn’t harm the network. Finally, the connection cannot be discriminated against based on application, service, content, sender, or receiver.”

Full Article: Norway gets net neutrality—voluntary, but broadly supported

I could not agree more. Note that this definition does not rule out some form a fair bandwidth shaping, and that is an important distinction because the Internet will be reduced to gridlock without some traffic control.

The funniest piece of irony in this whole debate is that the larger service providers are warning of Armageddon without some form of fairness rules, (and I happen to agree) , while at the same time their marketing arm is creating an image of infinite unfettered access for $29 a month. (I omitted a reference link because they change daily)

Posted in Commentary and Editorials, Net Neutrality, News. Tags: , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Bursting Is for the Birds (Burstable Internet Speed)

February 25, 2009 — netequalizer

IMG_20170403_180712

Internet Bursting

By Art Reisman, CTO, http://www.netequalizer.com

Art Reisman CTO www.netequalizer.com

Art Reisman

We posted this article back in May 2008. It was written from the perspective of an ISP; however many consumers are finding our site and may find after reading this article that their burstable Internet service is not all its cracked up to be.  If you are a home internet user, and a bit of a geek,  you might find this article on burstable Internet Speeds thought provoking.

The Demand Side

From many of our NetEqualizer users, we often hear, “I want to offer my customers a fixed-rate one-megabit link, but at night, or when the bandwidth is there, I want to let them have more”. In most cases, the reasons for doing this type of feature are noble and honest. The operator requesting it is simply trying to allow his or her customers access to a resource that has already been paid for. Call it a gesture of good faith. But, in the end, it can lead to further complications.

The problem with this offering is that it can be like slipping up while training your dog. You have to be consistent if you don’t want problems. For example, you can’t let the dog lick scraps off the table on Sunday and then tell him he can’t do it on Monday. Well, the same is true for your customers (We’re not insinuating they are dogs, of course). If you provide them with higher speeds when your network isn’t busy, they may be calling you when your contention ratios are at their peak during times of greater usage. To avoid this, it is best to not to let them ever go above their contracted amount – even when the bandwidth is available.

The Supply Side

Now that we’ve covered the possible confusion bursting may cause for your end-customer, we should take a look at how bursting affects an ISP from the perspective of variable rate bandwidth being offered by your upstream provider.

Back in 2001, when the NetEqualizer was just a lone neuron in the far corner of my developing brain, a partner and I were running a fledgling local neighborhood WISP. To get started, we pulled in a half T1 from a local bandwidth provider.

The pricing is where things got complicated. While we had a half T1, if we went over that more than five percent of the time, the provider was going to charge us large random amounts of cash. Sort of like using too many minutes on your cell phone.

According to our provider, this bursting feature was touted as a great benefit to us as the extra bandwidth would be there when we needed it. On the other hand, there was also this inner-fear of dipping into the extra bandwidth as we knew things could quickly get out of our control. For example, what if some psycho customer drove my usage over the half T1 for a month and bankrupted me before we even detected it? This was just one of the nightmare scenarios that went through my head.

Just to give you a better idea of what the experience was like, think of it this way. Have you ever made an international call from a hotel because it was your only choice and then gotten nailed with a $20 fee for a two minute conversation? This experience was kind of like that. You don’t really know what to expect, but you’re pretty sure it’s not going to be good.

I’m a business owner whose gut instinct is to live within my means. This includes determining how much bandwidth my business needs by sizing it correctly and avoiding hidden costs.

Yet, for many business owners this process is made more complicated by the policies of their bandwidth providers, bursting being a major factor. Well, it’s time to fight back. If you have a provider that offers you bursting, ask them the following questions:

  • Can I have in writing how this bursting feature works exactly?
  • Is a burst one second, 10 seconds, or 10 hours at a time?
  • Is it available all of the time, or just when my upstream provider(s) circuits are not busy?
  • If it is available for 10 hours, can I just negotiate a flat rate for this extra bandwidth?
  • Can you just turn it off for me?

For many customers that we’ve spoken with, bursting is creating more of a fear of overcharge than any tangible benefits. On the other hand, the bursting feature is often helping their upstream provider.

For an upstream provider who is subdividing a large Internet pipe into smaller pipes for resale, it is difficult to enforce a fixed bandwidth limit. So, rather than purchase expensive equipment to divvy up their bandwidth evenly amongst their customers, providers may instead offer bursting as a “feature”. And, while they are at it, they’ll charge you for something that you likely don’t really need.

So, think twice about who’s really benefiting from bursting and know that a few questions can go along way in evening out the deal with your provider. Chances are bursting may be doing your company more harm than good.

In short, while bursting may seem harmless on the surface for both the ISP and the customer, over time the potential problems can significantly outweigh the benefits. Put simply, the best way to avoid this is to maintain consistency at all times and leave bursting for the birds.

Posted in Commentary and Editorials, Network Speed. Tags: , , , , . 2 Comments »

Is running an ISP/Wisp a recession proof business ?

February 24, 2009 — netequalizer

February 24th, 2009

Lafayette Colorado

APconnections makers of the of the popular NetEqualizer line of bandwidth control and traffic shaping hardware appliances today announced results of their annual ISP  state of the business survey, below is the summary.

We have been asking our ISP/WISP customers  how their business is faring in the recession over the past several months and the answer is a resoundingly upbeat !

Out of the 25 ISPs ( Tier 2 providers) only two had seen  a decline in subscribers, 18 were holding their own, and 5 were seeing strong growth.  Here are some other tidbits.

1) Many Households will cancel their cable TV before giving up their broad band

2) Cancellations  for one provider mainly occured with foreclosures, again this supports the notion of people holding their broadband right up to the end of their finances.

3) Laid off workers are signing up for broad band as they see this as a needed for job searches and also in looking for ways to start small home businesses

4) We have seen an increase in inquiries for our services across the US and Canada

5) We have not heard of anybody foregoing food as of yet , but I would not put it past some of the gamers.

Posted in Business Advice. Tags: , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

How to set up a computer for network monitoring – for free!

February 14, 2009 — netequalizer

By Art Reisman, CTO, http://www.netequalizer.com

Art Reisman CTO www.netequalizer.com

Art Reisman

Editors note:

We often get asked where to find a simple network monitoring tool.  Well, you can get more economical than this!   All you need is some elbow grease and perseverance.  Note: We are not the original authors of this idea and have adopted it to our blog, unfortunately I was unable to trace back to the original to give credit.

How to set up a computer for network monitoring – All for free!

This is not as hard as it looks, once you have done it a time or two you can be up and running in less than 5 minutes, assuming you have high-speed access to the Internet.

Do you have a computer with the following?

  • 2 network cards installed or two on-board LAN ports
  • 1 CDRom drive
  • 256 to 1,024 or more Meg of RAM
  • monitor
  • keyboard
  • mouse (optional — it is necessary if you boot into the graphics mode, though)


If so, you can be minutes away from having a network monitoring machine up and running that you can insert in your network and see what is going on.  If you follow these instructions it will act as a transparent bridge so no other machines or routers will know the difference.

The Knoppix CD is a live CD distribution which does not need a floppy or hard drive to run. It is all self contained on the CD. It uses your RAM as a read/writeable area so you can still install a few programs if need be and edit most of the configuration files.

You can get the Knoppix iso image from http://knopper.net/knoppix/ or the English version at http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

The download page for English reading when this article was written is at http://knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html

Download a CD image of 4.02 or better. A typical file name will be:

KNOPPIX_V4.0.2CD-2005-09-23-EN.iso

The filename ends in -EN and if you speak english then get that one. If you speak German, then get the -DE one.

Now burn that .iso file to a CD using your program of choice (burning the CD image to make a bootable CDRom is not covered here).

You should insert your machine into the network so it is between the Router and the switch, assuming you want to monitor traffic going from or to your network and the Internet. You may have to use a crossover cable from one of your machines LAN ports to the router and a standard network cable from the other LAN port on your machine and the switch.

Internet or Router or ???
_________
| |
| | eth0
_____| |_______________________
|     Monitoring Unit                          |
|_____________________________|
||
eth1  ||
_______________________||______
|     Internal Network Switch                |
|_______________________________|
|| || || || || || || || || || ||
Your internal network users or whatever you want to monitor

Once that is done you can run Knoppix by placing it into your machine and booting up. If you have a limited video card or an old monitor then you can hit the appropriate key when Knoppix boots up and find the option to boot into text mode only. You may also want to do this if you have limited RAM.

Once you are booted up and running Knoppix you can do the following:

If you booted to an XWindows look then click on the little computer screen icon next to the house on the bottom tool bar. If you booted into text mode you do not have to do that.

Now gain root access by typing the following and then Enter:

su

Now that you are root you can run the following commands to start up your transparent bridge and get traffic flowing through the machine from one lan port to the other. The IP 192.168.1.153 below was use as an example along with the default gateway being 192.168.1.1 so change those if your network is on a different IP range. You will want to give it an IP so that you can get into the machine from another machine on the network. In some cases you might want to be able to get to it from the Internet so in that case you would have to give it an IP that can be reached from the Internet and not a 10.x.x.x or 192.168.x.x number.

ifconfig br0 down
brctl delbr br0
ifconfig eth1 down
ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth0 promisc 0.0.0.0 up
ifconfig eth1 promisc 0.0.0.0 up
brctl addbr br0
brctl addif br0 eth0
brctl addif br0 eth1
ifconfig br0 192.168.1.153 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
route add default gw 192.168.1.1

It may take a half a minute for traffic to start flowing through the transparent bridge br0.

Once you can do something like:

ping http://www.yahoo.com

and it comes back with ping times then you are ready to continue. BTW: hit CTRL C to stop ping.

apt-get update
apt-get install ntop

Say Y or hit enter to install ntop. When it is all done do the following:

mkdir /var/log/ntop/rrd
chmod -R 777 /var/lib/ntop
chmod -R 777 /var/log/ntop

warning: the chmod commands above allow anyone to read/write to those directories that can get to the machine so keep your machine safe with firewalls or passwords accordingly.

You can now run ntop. You need to run ntop from the console or via SSH first by just running the command:

ntop

It will ask you for an admin password and then again to,verify it. This is for the admin interface in ntop.

Once ntop is up and running in  a window you can leave that up and just go to your web browser and put in the URL of:

http://192.168.1.153:3000/

The :3000 is the special port that the ntop web server runs on.

If you choose the menu item Summary and then Network Load you should see a graph of your traffic. Not all ntop menu items are used on every system. Most of the time you will only be using the items under Summary or All Protocols.

You now have a running bandwidth monitoring system. ntop is the only application mentioned here but there are others installed on the default Knoppix CD already too.

Related post

The systems I have installed this routine on vary from a system with a Celeron to one with a P4 CPU Running on 10/100 Realtek chipsets to 10/100/1000 Intel chipsets. From 256 Meg of RAM to 2 GIG. Knoppix runs very well on a variety of hardware but your mileage may differ.

Created by APconnections, the NetEqualizer is a plug-and-play bandwidth control and WAN/Internet optimization appliance that is flexible and scalable. When the network is congested, NetEqualizer’s unique “behavior shaping” technology dynamically and automatically gives priority to latency sensitive applications, such as VoIP and email. Click here for a full price list.

Posted in Bandwidth Monitoring, Educational Articles. Tags: , , , , , . 1 Comment »

What our French Speaking Customers are saying.

February 13, 2009 — netequalizer

Nous sommes un fournisseur Internet sans-fil de la rive-sud de Montréal au Canada. Plusieurs communautés étaient totalement dépourvues de service haute-vitesse avant le lancement de notre projet Internet en région rurale.  Le service connu tellement de succès que les demandes pour un service de téléphonie IP se multiplièrent.
Nous avons dû faire des analyses pour évaluer la qualité de la voix sur notre réseau. La qualité sonore se dégradait très fortement en heure de pointe car des utilisateurs de P2P monopolisaient la majeure partie de notre bande passante. Ceci rendait pratiquement impossible l’utilisation du service de téléphonie IP durant ces heures.

Nous avons donc cherché une solution à ce problème afin de limiter le P2P et de prioriser la voix. Nous avons enfin trouvé la solution de NETEQUALIZER sur google.
En premier lieu, nous pensions à installer la version gratuite, Bandwidth Arbitrator, sur une machine existante. Nous sommes finalement arrivé à la conclusion que la machine vendue et supportée par NETEQUALIZER serait une option plus avantageuse. En achetant le NE2000, nous évitions les frais d’intégration par un techniciens Linux et avions confiance de ne pas rencontrer de problème de pilotes et de compatibilité lors de l’installation et des mises à jours subséquentes. Dès que nous avons branché l’appareil tout a …naturellement…fonctionné. La machine fonctionne de façon totalement transparente. Hormis les bienfaits, les clients ne s’aperçoivent de rien.

Nous avons maintenant près de 2000 clients, une centaine de lignes IP et la progression continue. Nous devons cette qualité de service en partie à NETEQUALIZER. Nous tenons à remercier toute l’équipe de NETEQUALIZER, en particulier Art Reisman, pour l’excellent service après-vente. Toutes nos questions furent répondues instantanément et habillement.

Louis-Paul Bourdon
Président
TARGO Communications

Posted in Testimonials. Tags: , , , . Leave a Comment »

NetEqualizer rolling out URL based traffic shaping.

February 10, 2009 — netequalizer

February 10th, 2009

Lafayette Colorado

APconnections makers of the of the popular NetEqualizer line of bandwidth control and traffic shaping hardware appliances today announced a major feature enhancement to their product line. URL based shaping.

In our recent newsletter we asked our customers if they were in need of URL based shaping and the feedback was a resounding YES.

Using our current release, administrators  have the ability to shape their network traffic by, IP address , Mac Address, VLAN or subnet. With addition of URL shaping, our product line will meet the demands of Co-location operators.

A distinction we need to make clear, is that URL based shaping is not related to DPI or content based shaping. URLs are public information as they travel across the Internet, and are basically  a mapping into human readable  form of an IP address; therefore URL based shaping does not require opening private data for inspection.

If you are interested in details regarding this feature please contact APconnections directly.

Posted in New Features, News. Tags: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

More on Deep Packet Inspection and the NebuAd case

February 6, 2009 — netequalizer

By Art Reisman

CTO of APconnections, makers of the plug-and-play bandwidth control and traffic shaping appliance NetEqualizer

Art Reisman CTO www.netequalizer.com

Editors note:

This  latest article published in DSL reports reminds me of the time  where a bunch of friends (not me),  are smoking a joint in a car when the police pull them over, and the guy holding the joint takes the fall for everybody.  I don’t want to see any of these ISPs get hammered as I am sure they are good companies.

It seems like this case should be easily settled.  Even if privacy laws were viloated , the damage was perhaps a few unwanted AD’s that popped up on a browser, not some form of extortion of private records. In any case, the message should be clear to any ISP, don’t implement DPI of any kind to be safe.  And yet, for every NebuAd privacy lawsuit case article I come across , I must see at least two or three press releases from vendors announcing major deals with  for DPI equipment ?

FUll Original article link from DSL reports

ISPs Play Dumb In NebuAD Lawsuit
Claim they were ‘passive participants’ in user data sales…
08:54AM Thursday Feb 05 2009 by Karl Bode
tags: legal · business · privacy · consumers · Embarq · CableOne · Knology
Tipped by funchords See Profile

The broadband providers argue that they can’t be sued for violating federal or state privacy laws if they didn’t intercept any subscribers. In court papers filed late last week, they argue that NebuAd alone allegedly intercepted traffic, while they were merely passive participants in the plan.

By “passive participants,” they mean they took (or planned to take) money from NebuAD in exchange for allowing NebuAD to place deep packet inspection hardware on their networks. That hardware collected all browsing activity for all users, including what pages were visited, and how long each user stayed there. It’s true many of the the carriers were rather passive in failing to inform customers these trials were occurring — several simply tried to slip this through fine print in their terms of service or acceptable use policies.

Posted in News. Tags: , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

NetEqualizer Bandwidth Control Tech Seminar Video Highlights

February 4, 2009 — netequalizer

Tech Seminar, Eastern Michigan University, January 27, 2009

This 10-minute clip was professionally produced January 27, 2009. It  gives a nice quick overview of how the NetEqualizer does bandwidth control while providing priority for VoIP and video.

The video specifically covers:

1) Basic traffic shaping technology and NetEqualizer’s behavior-based methods

2) Internet congestion and gridlock avoidance on a network

3) How peer-to-peer file sharing operates

4) How to counter the effects of peer-to-peer file sharing

5) Providing QoS and priority for voice and video on a network

6) A short comparison by a user (a university admin) who prefers NetEqualizer to layer-7 deep packet inspection techniques

Posted in Conferences. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »
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