Since the spring, a select group of broadband subscribers in Argentina has been getting a very special treat: super-fast Internet.
The promotion is an effort by Cablevision Argentina to persuade customers to upgrade their service, and so far it's been unusually effective. According to Marcelo Baletti, head of digital services at Cablevision, nearly 90 percent of customers who received an invitation to upgrade have responded to it.
The success of the Cablevision test has significant implications for the world's biggest telecom companies who are struggling to cope with the double whammy of rising capital costs and the erosion of traditional revenue sources such as voice and SMS messages. In response, companies like AT&T and Verizon are trying get customers to pony up for faster Internet speeds and more data. But Cablevision's experience shows there may be more innovative approaches.
"The challenge for the carriers is how do you deliver a differentiated service at a low price point, while still remaining agile," said Gary Messiana, chief executive officer of Nominum, which is providing the network infrastructure behind Cablevision's new service.
Messiana suggests that one way carriers can differentiate themselves is by building apps that offer their customers greater choice and more control over their Internet experience. In the past, this has been both a technical and business challenge, requiring hard-to-find expertise and coordination between different groups inside a carrier. But building apps on a new network architecture, such as Nominum's, can make it easier.
In addition to letting customers try out promotions such as faster broadband, Cablevision is also using Nominum's technology to prevent fraudulent connections to their network and to dramatically reduce the number of customers whose machines have been taken over by online criminals.
At the core of Cablevision's new capabilities is the Domain Name System, or DNS, one of the Internet's oldest technologies. For more than a decade, providing commercial-grade implementations of DNS to carriers and service providers has been Nominum's bread and butter.
DNS is often compared to a phone book. Traditionally, its main purpose has been to translate domain names like www.yummycupcakes.com that humans can remember to machine-readable IP addresses like 72.2.233.170. But Nominum has always had a bigger vision for the technology.
"People say that DNS was designed to translate numbers into names, but in reality, it was designed to be extensible on a number of levels," said Paul Mockapetris, Nominum's chief scientist and chairman.
Mockapetris is credited with being the inventor of DNS. In 1983, while working at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, Mockapetris proposed the architecture for a distributed and dynamic way of translating domain names into IP addresses. His proposal was accepted by his peers and played a crucial role in the Internet's expansion from a small network of researchers into the most important communications grid on the planet.
As Nominum's chief scientist, Mockapetris has led the company's efforts to continue to improve DNS and increase its profile. His success is reflected in Nominum's blue chip customer roster, which includes 130+ carriers and service providers around the world. Together, Nominum's customers currently process more than one trillion DNS queries a day.
But the company's most significant contribution to the Internet's evolution may be happening now. Nominum recently unveiled what it calls a "three-tier architecture," a new approach to DNS that basically makes it much easier for companies to build applications that tap into the intelligence that resides in the domain name system.
"DNS has always been the repository of the data of what is going on in the network," Mockapetris explained. In addition to keeping track of where websites are located, DNS also knows where bad actors or suspected bad actors can be found.
This makes it an effective tool for fighting online crime, and particularly botnets. These large networks of compromised computers can be used for everything from sending out spam to launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. They were recently cited by U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano as posing as great a risk to national security as Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda-related groups.
Using DNS, carriers can prevent infected computers, also known as zombies, from communicating with their controller, provided that the controller is using the domain name system and not some other form of communication. "In our analysis, we found over two-thirds of botnets have a domain name associated with them," said Jose Nazario, senior security researcher at Arbor Networks, a security firm offering DDoS protection.
Between 10 and 25 percent of all home machines in the United States are believed to be infected with some sort of malicious code, and the numbers may be even higher in Latin America and other parts of the developing world.
Cablevision was able to reduce its botnet infection rate by over 60 percent by using an app built on Nominum's new architecture, according to Baletti. In addition to shutting down botnet activity, Cablevision also used the app to let customers know they were infected and to suggest ways they could clean up their machines.
"We didn't know all the different ways that DNS could be used," Baletti said. “Nominum showed us there were a lot of ways it could benefit our subscribers."
