BT pull out of Phorm

[Ian Batten]

On 9 Jul 2009, at 01:49, Richard Clayton wrote:
>
> decided to deploy a "network level opt-out" (viz: that if you opted- 
> out
> of using Phorm then your traffic would never go near the Phorm
> equipment, fixing one of the PR/legal problems that people perceived
> with the originally described system design).
>
> However, designing and deploying this new scheme turned out -- for  
> some
> reason -- to be rather difficult.

That's a good point.   If so, one reason might be regulatory, and ties  
in with Clayton's law of RADIUS servers.

In order to provide a network-level opt-out, the system would have to  
know about real accounts: rather than being able to intercept abstract  
entities based on a cookie anywhere in the network, it would need to  
be able to relate to a real life entity who had signed a form saying  
they wanted a network-level opt-out.   That means that the information  
would need to be available to, and acted up, by the radius client.    
That's probably going to involve having the BRAS that terminates the  
customer's PPPoA session understanding an extra flag in the customer's  
RADIUS lookup and routing the traffic accordingly.

That's not hard if it's all your own kit.  But it isn't: Retail's ISP  
service is built from Wholesale IP Stream, and (a) Wholesale have no  
incentive to provide an extra substantial feature for one customer for  
which they cannot charge and (b) the other ISPs would call foul if  
Wholesale were spending time and money on a modification to a  
regulated service made solely for the benefit of a BT operating  
division.

ian