[KnowItAll]

I recall having a discussion with someone over the last few years about a what is called coloring of data or traffic.

Essentially this would involve an ISP or a mobile phone provider filtering and more importanly altering well known packets / data streams to insert their messages.

A potential application was a search on google via your 3G phone might be altered slightly (with or without approval from google) by the ISP or telco to insert their own advertisement or sponsored result.

Does anyone have a source or pointer where I could research this?

[paulmears]

Not sure if the same as the issue you are looking at. I know of colouring as method for tagging to move packets in priority especially related to Voice to solve QOS issues. Below article may give bit more background


Initially, there were two methods of providing QOS for voice.
The earliest standard, which was called RSVP (resource reservation protocol), involved a high degree of router intelligence in all the devices connected between the two parties involved in the call. This method involved sending special signaling instructions requesting a bandwidth guarantee, however unless all the devices between the two parties could understand and act on the signaling messages the QOS would fail. This was a costly upgrade for early adopters and usually required a single vendor to supply all the equipment.

Subsequently, a better method of QOS was required and DiffServ was the answer. By marking or ‘colouring’ the stream of voice packets sent from an IP phone itself meant that the devices between the two parties did not have to participate in negotiating special bandwidth guarantees. It simply placed the ‘coloured’ voice traffic in a special priority queue, which meant voice packets got sent before data packets. Every major networking vendor has universally adopted this form of QOS.

3Com, which has recently expanded its session initiation protocol (SIP) technology to create convergence applications suite, says data infrastructure is now 100% reliable and there is no latency issues. There are voice standards that networking vendors have to adhere to in order to maintain a certain standard. “If vendors follow SIP then there are no issues with the quality of the voice simply because of the robustness of the protocol. We are spending significantly on research and development of voice because we view this as a big wave,” Wael explains.

Many discount toll service providers use another form of IP telephony called voice-over IP (VoIP), where the call is made using a standard telephone, but the call path is over an IP network. Usually that IP network is the internet. Unfortunately, the internet is made from several different carriers who deliberately do not look for ‘coloured’ packets and treat all internet traffic with same priority. It is for this reason that many discount calling card calls sound metallic and sometimes intermittently break-up.

However, not all VoIP calls travel over the internet. Large telco’s have their own network infrastructure and have the necessary QOS to prioritise voice traffic over data when correctly configured. It is almost impossible to detect the difference between a traditional switched TDM call and a VoIP call.

[KnowItAll]

A little bit more research indicates that this might be a term from the TV broadcasting industry ....

Its not related to priority / QoS .. more related to changing the content of the "packet"

Unfortunately its not an easy term to google ...

[paulmears]

Sounds a bit 'dodgy'....

[PDLM]

I seem to recall a discussion on the subject, but it was a long time ago and I've moved on from that now... but the term you need to Google these days is "internet content adaptation" - here's an article http://www.isp-planet.com/technology/icap1.html

[KnowItAll]

PDLM: Did I have that discussion with you?

I'm trying to bring it into context of this new phone / service from toshiba.

[PDLM]

Yes - that page links to the same page as the one I linked above.

I was certainly talking to mobile operators in around the region trying to sell them platforms that had an early version of that sort of capability 4 or 5 years ago...

[KnowItAll]

(Yeah.. I linked it... devlib is one of our sites)

[PDLM]

OIC - sorry - wasn't really paying attention. Glad to be of service