Cisco better hope wireless “net neutrality” does not happen. It just bought a company called Starent that helps wireless carriers manage the mobile exaflood.
See this partial description of Starent’s top product:
Intelligence at Work
Key to creating and delivering differentiat ed ser vices—and meeting subscriber demand—is the ST40’s ability to recognize different traffic flows, which allows it to shape and manage bandwidth, while interacting with applications to a very fine degree. The system does this through its session intelligence that utilizes deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, ser vice steering, and intelligent traffic control to dynamically monitor and control sessions on a per-subscriber/per-flow basis.
The ST40’s interaction with and understanding of key elements within the multimedia call—devices, applications, transport mechanisms, policies—and assists in the ser vice creation process by:
• Providing a greater degree of information granularity and flexibility for billing, network planning, and usage trend analysis
• Sharing information with external application ser vers that perform value-added processing
• Exploiting user-specific attributes to launch unique applications on a per-subscriber basis
• Extending mobility management information to non-mobility aware applications
• Enabling policy, charging, and Quality of Ser vice (QoS) features
Traffic management. QoS. Deep Packet Inspection. Per service billing. Special features and products. Many of these technologies and features could be outlawed or curtailed under net neutrality. And the whole booming wireless arena could suffer.
