Digital Home Thoughts: Taming the Wild Wireless World

"What will DPI devices be used for? According to ABI, "optimizing" mobile networks will be one of the chief uses—and by "optimizing" they mean limiting or prioritizing traffic from data-hungry mobile devices. "Brute force won't solve this problem," said ABI's Aditya Kaul. "If you double the number of smartphone users, you can't just spend $10 billion to double the capacity of your infrastructure.""

Lately, companies have been trying to find every way possible to make more use out of what they have and will go to great lengths to reduce their costs. Deep Packet Inspection, aka DPI, is known to be one of those options. Being in Canada, I see a fair amount of use for this with the wired kind of Internet connection. Both Bell and Rogers limit the speeds of customers that are using BitTorrent at certain times of the day. The result is that I feel like my internet connection is hampered. The result is that I do not use the Internet like I used to bgfore. If I want to do certain things like watch particular videos, share some files, etc, I have to take into account if my ISP is going to put me in the slow lane for doing so. Now it seems like it is coming to wireless networks as well. The end result is that if DPI wins, I feel that our use of the Internet will be reduced. It will no longer be a site of wealth and information, but a limited, destination based form of commuication.