One of the corporate blogs I review on occasion is Cisco’s The Platform.
In a post published on Sunday, and in time for the press deluge coming out of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Cisco pre-announced its new “framework” for mobile operators, called MOVE or Monetization, Optimization, and Videoscape Experience.
Run of the mill marketing prose. My attention was instead engaged by a product referred to in some of the MOVE marketing material, Cisco’s ASR 5000 “gateway mutlti-media platform.”
The impressively engineered ASR 5000 could probably stop a Facebook inspired revolution at the speed of a mouse click. And as a propaganda minister, you wouldn’t have to take your country’s Internet off the grid to accomplish this.
About a year old, the ASR 5000 series is a packet crunching wonder. Think of it as a super intelligent router, feeding 3G acronyms, UMTS, CDMA, LTE and WiMax, into its redundant 320 Gbps of switching fabric. On the other side of the switching architecture are positioned “in-line services”—apps residing right on the wire that add the intelligence to route and block packets.
Mobile and wired operators would likely be interested in the highly granular billing and deep packet inspection software capabilities of the ASR 5000.
Based on reading the product literature and a quick dip into the 1000-plus page Product Overview (see reference), I’ll go on record as saying that we, the broadband subscribers of America, can look forward to much more precise bills from our ISPs and wireless providers.
Well, you knew the era of very simple broadband billing wasn’t going to last.
With intelligent switches like the ASR 5000, we’ll see tiered billing taken to a potentially nit-pickingly complex extreme. Just as we were getting accustomed to data usage billing, we’re at the start of a new era of broadband accounting based on criteria reflecting when (as in time of day) and how long we’re connected to a specific web site or service, the content being transferred, or the application that was used.
It’s all possible. And there’s a lot of flexibility given to operators through, to use a tech-marketing cliche I found sprinkled in the manuals, “rules.” In other word, this thing can be programmed with flowchart-like workflows to accomplish astonishingly detailed per packet processing and filtering.
There’s nothing inherently wrong in analyzing packets, say in a tiered billing pricing model. In economist-speak, the operators are engaging in price discrimination, usually a sign of market power but not illegal.
In the US, at worst, the ASR 5000 might lead to lots of angry billing disputes and consumer complaints best handled by the FTC. And depending on how the FCC’s net neutrality non-blocking rules fare, the ASR 5000 could enable operators to violate open internet principles.
But in the rest of the world, the ASR 5000 deep packet inspection prowess lends itself to more sinister intentions. It could quickly allow a state-controlled ISP to filter undesirable content (tweets with specific hashtags) or completely block rebellious websites (Facebook).
There wouldn’t be a need to bring the entire network infrastructure off-line. The ASR 500o allows blacklists—check the manual, it’s one of the features—to be configured that would block connections at the edge of the network, acting as a virtual policeman cordoning off streets, but letting the rest of the traffic to continue around the obstructions.
And I don’t want to go into the ASR 5000’s potential to monitor traffic or it’s ability to steer URLs to fake sites, in so called man-in-the-middle schemes.
Related articles
- For Service Providers, the Opportunity to MOVE to Great Profitability (cisco.com)
- Enhanced Charging (cisco.com)
- Cisco ASR 5000 Product Overview (cisco.com)
- Canada To Mandate ISP Deep Packet Inspection (news.slashdot.org)
- Out of Egypt Censorship, US Tech Export Under Fire (yro.slashdot.org)
