It has been a bit over a month now with Rohde & Schwarz. Last week we hosted an event to celebrate the acquisition and other things, such as our new premises, six successful years of ipoque, and our new corporate design. This was the first time since the acquisition that I had the chance to talk to several of our partners personally.
Just before Christmas we sold our Jura F70 espresso machine in an auction to an ipoque employee. Not really worth a blog entry, you might think. But this particular coffee machine is special. It was ipoque’s first major investment in “staff well-being infrastructure” five years ago. And the money came from our first traffic management installation. It was a good investment.
In the beginning, we were three people working out of a single office room in an incubator in Leipzig. But the company kept growing and quite soon the Jura service engineer started complaining with every maintenance: “This machine is not built for that many cups per day.”
So, this is it? When I saw the news after the net neutrality discussion in Brussels the week before last, I was immensely relieved. Compared with the US – they are still in the middle of the net neutrality debate – Europe managed to find an acceptable compromise within a few months.
Following up on the net neutrality workshop organized by VATMearlier this year, in a second meeting last week there seemed to be some consensus among German operators that charging content providers for downstream traffic sent mostly from the United States through their networks to German subscribers, though an intriguing idea, will not work. And these subscribers will remain their main revenue source also in the near future. So what can ISPs do to counter the downward spiral of ever faster and cheaper flat rate plans?
I spent the semi-final in a bar in North Africa. Together with two Lebanese and a Dutch guy. The Lebanese have been such great supporters of the German team, that I doubt to find “greater” fans somewhere in Germany. The second greatest wish of the Dutch, after winning the final, was to win it against Germany. Unfortunately, Germany lost the game.
Anyway, never before we as ipoque got so many e-mails from customers and partners from all over the world gratulating us for the German team. I would like to take the chance to thank all of you for your sympathy and your support during the last weeks.
Sure, football is just a minor matter, but probably the most exciting one in the world!
Last week I participated in a meeting of the German Association of Telecommunications and Value-Added Service Providers (VATM), which got together to establish a net neutrality working group. The discussion pretty much reiterated the arguments that have been exchanged in the United States for quite some time now. So far this has not been a big topic in Germany or Europe outside of some expert and activist circles. To my knowledge, operators have pretty much ignored the net neutrality debate so far. And I am not entirely sure why that is — maybe because we are just lagging behind the US as in so many other cases, or because of a different attitude toward civil liberties. Either way, I certainly welcome a debate provided it involves all stakeholders: legislators, operators, civil rights activists and technology experts.
Sometimes it seems to me that in Germany some political and social decisions take longer than in the rest of the world. This was my impression when I listened to the panel discussion at the GVU Branchenforum in Berlin last week.
Honestly, I am surprised by the great response to OpenDPI. Two weeks after releasing version 1.0 we have counted 1000 downloads. This is much more than we expected for this very special piece of software.
Making the own intellectual property public is an interesting experience. Of course we had a long internal discussion about that irreversible step beforehand. What do we give away and what will we get back? What will other people say about our software? But all responses showed that it was the right step.
Last week, I participated in a workshop session called “Deep Packet Inspection: Technology, Promise & Controversy. What You Need to Know.” at the Broadband World Forum Europe 2009 in Paris. The panel discussion with participants from DPI vendors, Internet service providers and net neutrality activists was meant to “foster an open, balanced and rigorous discussion of DPI’s capabilities, benefits, limits and concerns”.
Many Internet users worry about net neutrality and online privacy these days. And they see deep packet inspection (DPI) as their arch enemy. Common claims are that DPI reads the content of all packets and then decides based on the nature of the content whether to forward, slow down or drop that packet. This is a misconception based on poor understanding how today’s DPI for Internet traffic management works.
DPI is only the core technology of traffic management systems that is used for application classification. This is done by scanning the first few packets — including their payload — of each network flow for certain patterns out of a predefined list. DPI does not ‘read’ or even ‘understand’ any communication content. As soon as the communicating application of a network flow is identified, DPI stops for that flow. Then, bandwidth management rules determine how this flow is treated. Possible rules are:
Just before Christmas we sold our Jura F70 espresso machine in an auction to an ipoque employee. Not really worth a blog entry, you might think. But this particular coffee machine is special. It was ipoque’s first major investment in “staff well-being infrastructure” five years ago. And the money came from our first traffic management installation. It was a good investment.
So, this is it? When I saw the news after the 
Sometimes it seems to me that in Germany some political and social decisions take longer than in the rest of the world. This was my impression when I listened to the panel discussion at the 
Honestly, I am surprised by the great response to OpenDPI. Two weeks after releasing version 1.0 we have counted 
