This week marked a surprising end to Zeugma Systems Inc. , a privately owned company that tried to redefine access gear by integrating routing, subscriber management, and service management at the edge of the network.

Company sources confirmed Wednesday night that Zeugma is no more and that its entire staff had been dismissed as of Monday.

Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Zeugma burst onto the scene in 2008, promising to bring a new level of intelligence to the edge of the network by combining high-throughput routing with enormous computing capacity. (See Zeugma Rethinks Edge Routing.)

Part of the plan was to show telcos how to differentiate their services by using Deep Packet Inspection at the edge of the network to track individual customer flows and provide quality of service for video and voice, digital storefront transactions, and more. (See Zeugma's Brainy Bandwidth Meter .)

As it turns out, the company may have been ahead of, or just behind, its time. DPI is being incorporated in different parts of the network by multiple vendors, even as telecom service providers continue to battle the regulatory and consumer protection forces that believe DPI is an invasion of privacy or an anti-competitive tool, or both.

Zeugma was founded in 2004 by Andrew Harries, a founder of Sierra Wireless, who became CEO, and Siegfried (Sig) Luft, the CTO, who was a founder of Siara Systems, which was later incorporated into Redback Networks, which was later bought by Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC). (See Redback Networks Inc. (RBAK) and IPTV Drives Ericsson to Redback.) Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC). (See Redback Networks Inc. (RBAK) and IPTV Drives Ericsson to Redback.)

— Carol Wilson, Chief Editor, Events, Light Reading