cPacket Networks, Tuesday announced the deployment of its cNAT real-time IP Address Resolution (IPAR) capabilities across the United Kingdom.
The roll-out comes after a successful trial and production deployment of cNAT by a top-three UK service provider ahead of the UK's IPAR regulatory compliance requirements as part of the Investigatory Powers Bill.
The Investigatory Powers Bill is designed to help UK law enforcement fight terrorism and other threats to public safety by improving the ability to track criminals by using IP Address Resolution (IPAR). This bill requires service providers to identify, in real-time, who used a particular external IP Address, and from where and when it was used.
cPacket said it delivers a complete solution that provides the real-time IP address correlation capabilities required for the UK's service provider networks. The bill, initially passed in June and recently ratified, will come into force at the beginning of 2017.
The top-three service provider in the UK, who began its production deployment of cNAT earlier this fall, has more than 9 million customers and carries nearly 40 percent of the UK's overall mobile traffic. A government compliance officer within this leading UK service provider is using cNAT to overcome technical challenges with timestamp synchronization between their network and the system that identifies activity as questionable or suspicious.
The UK service provider's previous capabilities did not allow for timestamp synchronization. This left them with a large window of time to review and billions of records to dig through. For example, a service provider with 60,000 users on its network per second would create a lookup table consisting of 216 million records for a one-hour duration of network activity. Now, with the help of its IP Map correlation feature, cNAT allows service providers to correlate records much more easily, and reduce possible matches exponentially, enabling service providers to bring those 216 million records down to 120,000 (by a factor of 1,800) and at far less cost than competitive solutions.
Brendan O'Flaherty, CEO at cPacket Networks
Meeting the UK's Investigatory Powers Bill requirements is a prime example of the scalability and resolution capabilities that our real-time next-gen network performance monitoring and analytics solution can provide.
Jennifer Clark, Vice President, Network Research at analyst group 451 Research
Our research with the global operators and other industry authorities supports that if the efficacy of this law, and the technology that enables its implementation, are proven, similar rules will likely be enacted by other countries and regional governmental bodies.
