Wednesday, March 11, 2009

The Perfect Storm

We have all heard and read about the dramatic increase in mobile data usage. For me it became real when I talked to an employee at a mobile operator in Europe. He described as a "perfect storm": the combination of flat rate tariffs + the deployment of new infrastructure (3G, HSDPA, HSUPA) + new "iPhone like" phones have created an explosion in mobile data traffic in his country: + 50% over the past 3 months! He worries that his network would reach maximum capacity within 6 months...

Not only is he running out of bandwidth, but he is also blind: 98% of the subscriber traffic bypasses his own portal and goes directly to the (mobile) Web; he can't see the traffic. The key questions which are keeping him awake at night: - are people using mobile phones or PCs with 3G cards? Which services are used? What is the typical usage pattern?

For him, the solution was to install a Qosmos ixMachine behind the GGSN. The traffic data is extracted in real-time from the network, structured into .CSV files and fed into a BI software (QlickView in this case) which generates detailed reports. This creates complete visibility on devices (phones/PCs), services and usage patterns. Armed with this detailed network intelligence, he is now able to adjust pricing schemes, develop new services, optimize network traffic and even envisage partnerships with selected Web players.

I suspect most mobile operators face similar storms - luckily network intelligence technology is now available to help them ;-)

Jerome

Monday, March 9, 2009

The Power of Metadata

Metadata is information about communication: who communicates with whom, how, when, and where. For example VoIP caller/called party, Email / Webmail sender / receiver / subject, IM contact list / status / sender / receiver, route update in routing protocol, etc.

With the exponential increase in IP communications, metadata has a great untapped potential for mapping communication patterns, especially for protection purposes as in the case of lawful intercept. It also solves the problem of ballooning storage requirements. In fact, the metadata approach may even be the ONLY way to handle lawful intercept in the future!

So the opportunity is to leverage metadata for intelligence gathering, for ex. to reconstruct links between people, to understand which virtual IDs the same person is using (starting from physical IP/IMSI) or to identify intentionally hidden information (“the Dark Web”).

However, IP communication metadata is not readily available on operator servers, or resides on third-party Web servers, outside the control of a given telco (think P2P,social networking, etc.). Therefore, metadata has to be extracted directly from the network.

So how can buyers of LI solutions leverage IP metadata?

  1. Use the rich set of information available with IP metadata to build completely new types of intelligence solutions - as a complement to content-focused solutions. This gives a better understanding of potential threats (the macro-view)
  2. Take advantage of more computer-based information processing 1.5 billion Internet users, thousands of Web applications… the number of analysts cannot increase at the same rate as the number of IP communications, the number of Web applications and the amount of content generated > need to think differently?!
The solution is to implement automatic detection of suspicious behavioral communication patterns and create real-time view of the threat situation based on continuous streaming of metadata and network information. There is also an opportunity to minimize storage and post-processing time by extracting significant information and structuring it as soon as each metadata is available

Long live metadata!

Jerome

 
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