Even as Comcast and vendor Sandvine take heat for peer-to-peer traffic shaping, deep packet inspection vendor CloudShield debuted its own platform last week that leverages DPI for prioritizing P2P packets.

CloudShield's P2P solution rides on top of the CS-2000 content processing solution, the company's core DPI platform. The vendor touts the pure processing power of that platform, including the ability to operate at wire speeds of up to 10 Gb/s. That allows service providers to put CloudShield boxes even deeper in the network — specifically at network peering points — to provide an even greater control of the traffic heading down their networks, said Bill Scull, vice president of marketing for CloudShield.

“Our location on the network is a little bit different by virtue of the capabilities of our box,” said Scull. “It's the typical story of the tragedy of the commons: You take a public resource, and you get some users that are greedy about consumption. Carriers need some way to try to shape that traffic and maintain balance at peering points.”

Comcast has taken heat not only for shaping traffic but also for reportedly introducing spoof packets that can “fool” P2P services into stalling or shutting down connections.

CloudShield's approach is to “shape the traffic, not to spoof it,” said Scull, but he admits that any approach may draw a share of controversy in the current atmosphere. “I don't envy the carriers in this respect,” he said. “It's bound to be a political issue.”