Going beyond VoIP, IPTV or even Triple Play, today's unifying theme is Service-over-IP (SoIP). In other words, all revenue-generating next-gen services (voice, video and data) introduced by carriers now share the common feature that they are simply digitalized data carried over IP-based Ethernet.

SoIP providers can no longer ignore the harsh business reality of providing a fixed-income service while accommodating ever-growing monitoring demands.

The weapon of choice for service-oriented network monitoring is Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) which are high performance software solutions that run on standard server hardware platforms enabling providers to:

1. identify, classify and even selectively block IP traffic to prevent revenue leakage from unauthorized SoIP services.
2. detect and protect against security threats and network anomalies.
3. facilitate wiretapping and reconstruction of relevant digital transactions.

For the technology to work, DPI must be able to unobtrusively acquire production traffic from multiple sources across a redundant network. Recently, instead of using conventional network taps, Data Access Network (DAN) has emerged as the "Best Practice" data access and network monitoring architecture for cost-effective DPI monitoring.

Read this brief paper to learn more.