Erictric

Virgin Media has officially announced that they will start testing a ‘deep packet inspection’ system called CView, which will monitor the levels of illegal file sharing on its network. This announcement makes Virgin Media the first Internet Service Provider in the UK to test such technology.

The services for the system are provided by a company called Detica. The way the system works is that by actually looking into the packets, it can determine which are licensed and which are not. However, the system cannot identify individual file sharers. The parent company, Detica says the following about the system:

“CView is the first commercially available solution to provide a metric highlighting the volume and nature of Peer to Peer (P2P) file sharing activity on an ISP network. It does not, and cannot, identify individual Internet users. The only accurate way of providing a ‘digital piracy’ index to both ISPs and CPs is to measure the actual P2P activity taking place within an ISP network.”

A Virgin Media spokesperson has said that about 40% its network will be monitored. The company has emphasized that no individual customer records will be kept and that they are just interested in finding out the overall levels of illegal file sharing. Regardless of the findings, the provider will not take legal action against offending subscribers.

[ The Next Web ]