Turn consumers into their own internet traffic managers, Juniper tells CRTC

The CRTC’s first day of hearings on Internet traffic management practices, or Net Neutrality, focused largely on the technological solutions available to ISPs to deal with network congestion, but a solution from Juniper Networks to give consumers greater control in managing their own Internet uses grabbed some attention. In a series of questions from Saskatchewan and Manitoba commissioner Candice Molnar, Juniper’s VP of technology Scott Stevens explained that the consumer could have control over prioritizing the type of Internet traffic or applications to the home. “I would decide that that was important to me and there would be a signal either from me directly to a policy server or on my behalf from the application to the policy server,” he said. “So if my son was playing games at the same time that I was trying to watch news, his traffic wouldn’t fair as well during congestion as my news would because I asked for that to be prioritized ahead of his gaming traffic. So it gives me the ability to determine what I think is more important for my home and what I want to do.” Stevens referred to this capability as white listing, an approach that gives the consumer as well as the service provider the ability to prioritize traffic. The technology is not yet deployed in Canada, but is currently in use in other parts of the world. Stevens said, however, that this technology shouldn’t be viewed as the silver bullet solution to the Internet congestion problem. “I don’t want to paint a policy framework and the ability for consumers to determine what is important as a panacea,” he said. “I do think we have to have multiple different strategies in place and I think the ability to white list is one of those that’s very intriguing and of great value to the consumer.” Juniper, a California-based network vendor firm with more than 7,000 employees and US$3.5 billion in revenue in 2008, explained to commissioners that it deals with congestions at three levels. The least flexible is at the network level where traffic flows and loads are predetermined. At the applications and policy control layers, congestion management is much more flexible. Deep packet inspection (DPI), a term that has received much of the negative attention around traffic shaping, is conducted at the application level. “DPI and policy management are tools that we can leverage to help innovate at the network level to react in real time to concerns or expectations that may occur in the network and give some flexibility in what we might do in the network,” explained Stevens. These tools better equip the Internet provider to deal with congestion in a more dynamic manner through constant feedback between the network, applications and the consumer. So rather than setting strict bandwidth limits at the network level, ISPs can use policy management and DPI to react to changes in the network such as the onslaught of peer-to-peer file sharing which can clog the network. “Having the ability to actively interact, to provide feedback loops if you will, to control user experience, to control virtualization or to control security, provides interesting levels of flexibility that we believe will allow the network to innovate to keep up with innovation that’s occurring in the application space today,” he added. In addition to white listing, Juniper offers black listing and consumption management technologies. Black listing blocks, limits or mitigates the effect of applications on a network. It can be used to block malicious software. The consumption management model is used primarily to address the 5% of Internet users who consume upwards of 50% of traffic. Network Letter will continue to monitor the Net Neutrality hearing throughout the week.

Turn consumers into their own internet traffic managers, Juniper tells CRTC

News | July 7, 2009

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