As the telecom platform deployment industry expands year after year, it is not that surprising that service provider deep packet inspection (DPI) product revenue grew 29 percent to over $470 million worldwide in 2011, according to recent research from Infonetics (News - Alert) Research. Deep packet inspection allows you to look deeper into the actual traffic and determine more about what is being done at an individual session layer, which provides information about an individual process between two points as opposed to just general traffic.

In fact, within the company’s Service Provider Deep Packet Inspection Products report, which studies standalone DPI vendors as well as solutions for both wireless and fixed mobile networks in depth, some other findings were released, including that service provider DPI products will continue to ramp up in burgeoning markets such as Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa as operators continuously seek ways to address more traffic caused by increased customers while still adhering to rigorous standards and providing an ultra high level of security.

Operators are turning to DPI solutions, as they help to perform media caching, which is when video content is tagged based on importance in which the most crucial items receive priority as well as enhanced QoS. Moreover, currently DPI is being seamlessly integrated into a much larger array of solutions such as video optimization and mobile offload, thus enabling suppliers to power DPI technology on an OEM basis.

NEI knows all too well that unified threat management, which generally combines things like firewalling, intrusion prevention, gateway antivirus, and anti-spam, is a big user of deep packet inspection. In the telco space, you have session border controllers, which are commonly used between two VoIP providers to provide connectivity, security, quality of service and other media services between disparate networks. And in the mobile 4G space, application load balancers are also becoming more prevalent.

“As we move forward, there is a lot of upcoming technology around multi-core processors and some new API layers that are going to allow a general purpose server to do much faster packet processing. This will enable mini general purpose servers to be standalone packet processors, “Austin Hipes, vice president of technology stated in a recent podcast.

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