Hell, your ISP can examine each and every communication that happens on the Internet.
And the Feds can just buy access to the data your ISP collects. In real time.
In Procera's ideal world, your grandma in Poughkeepsie should pay less to use only e-mail and the Web than you do to access e-mail, the Web, P2P, VoIP, and online gaming. A "big dumb pipe" approach this is not. In fact, as Procera make clear in press materials, "Adding capacity is not the answer!" to ISP bandwidth problems.
Throttle 5 million P2P users with $800K DPI monster
By Nate Anderson | Published: May 12, 2008 - 05:00AM CT
Procera Networks will announce today a new standard in deep packet inspection (DPI) gear: an 80Gbps monster called the PacketLogic PL10000 that is targeted at tier-1 network operators. At up to $800,000 a unit, these aren't cheap, but when you want to throttle, inspect, and shape traffic in real-time on a major network, this is now the fastest thing on the market (and by a large margin).
Procera's appliances all run the same software, so the difference between them is in the interfaces and the number of racks the units take up. The PL10000, the company's top-of-the-line offering and provides 5 10Gbps channels and 9 1Gbps channels in a 12 rack unit. It can handle 80Gbps of total speed, but most ISPs will want to keep an eye on traffic moving in both directions, bringing this down to 40Gbps each way.
The PL10000 can handle up to 5 million subscribers and can track 48 million real-time data flows. That's certainly a potent piece of hardware, but larger ISPs will need more. That's why Procera designed the new machines with full support for synchronizing traffic flows where return traffic might be routed to a different PacketLogic machine. The machine receiving the return traffic can make the machine monitoring the outbound traffic aware that it sees the other half of a TCP/IP conversation, for example, giving the devices more accuracy than those which might only have access to one side. The capability also incurs overhead of only 2-6 percent, far better than the 25 or 50 percent sometimes seen in competing products.
