cPacket Offers Real-Time IP Address Resolution

SAN JOSE, CA – cPacket Networks, a provider of next-generation network performance monitoring and analysis solutions, today announced the expansion of its service provider solutions portfolio with the introduction of cNAT. This breakthrough feature provides real-time IP Address Resolution Compliance for service providers, by correlating traffic from both sides of a carrier-grade gateway (CGG), allowing an individual user’s IP address to be identifiable when Network Address Translation (NAT) is used.

CNAT alleviates compliance challenges that are inherent to the use of Network Address Translation, which hinders authorities from identifying users by their external IP addresses when potential malicious activity has been identified. cNAT also protects against potential compliance over-reach, as the correlation is performed without the need to harvest all subscriber data for post-analysis.

The need for solutions such as cNAT has increased exponentially with the proliferation of VoIP and VoLTE by service providers. cNAT is cPacket’s response to the growing regulatory demands on service providers when using Network Address Translation. A carrier grade gateway allows private networks to connect to the Internet securely, while preventing external users on the Internet from initiating a connection with that private network. However, by implementing NAT, it also obscures the identity of the private network users. For instance, one external IP address could be shared by several thousand individual users’ internal IP addresses.

cNAT is the first solution to close this gap by providing correlation of the internal and external IP addresses in real-time, allowing external user activity to be identifiable to the specific mobile subscriber, and in turn enabling law enforcement agencies to identify the source when there is suspect activity.

“Before today, service providers have had difficulty meeting the new compliance standards for IP Address Resolution, such as IPAR in the UK,” said cPacket CEO Brendan O’Flaherty. “cNAT provides our customers with a cost-effective and easily deployable solution that enables compliance, while also delivering line-rate performance monitoring to ensure end-user quality of experience.”

cNAT is the latest addition for service providers to the cPacket Intelligent Monitoring Fabric, a platform designed to help large-scale network operators identify and overcome issues in real-time, whether related to performance, anomalies or security. The ability to monitor network traffic in real-time at line-rate speeds of 10Gbps or higher has become a challenge for many traditional performance monitoring solutions, as network traffic growth has outpaced their ability analyze traffic.

Without using a Distributed Monitoring Architecture, such as that from cPacket Networks, network operators are forced to rely on packet capture with post-analysis, which is expensive and has inherent scalability issues; or the use of a monitoring aggregation switch network, which can unexpectedly drop traffic or introduce data anomalies into the monitoring environment.

cPacket Networks Inc.