Interkey products
Deep packet inspection for Saudi telecom networks
Interkey Intelligent DPI detects, classifies and controls traffic in real time at carrier scale. It is an Interkey product, developed in technology collaboration with Huawei, deployed on the operator’s own infrastructure and supported from Riyadh.
Orientation
At a glance
The whole page in one table, before the detail.
- Product
- Interkey Intelligent DPI, an Interkey product
- Technology model
- Developed in technology collaboration with Huawei; localisation, integration and Riyadh support by Interkey
- Deployment
- Inline or out-of-band, on the operator’s own infrastructure
- Classification
- Application and protocol identification, including encrypted and tunnelled flows
- Recognition accuracy
- 99%, as stated in Interkey’s own product material (see the note below: validate on your own traffic)
- Commercial model
- Quote only: priced per deployment and capacity
What Interkey adds
What localisation actually consists of
Interkey Intelligent DPI is developed in technology collaboration with Huawei. The inspection technology comes out of that collaboration; the product an operator buys, deploys and calls at 2am is Interkey’s. It is neither a Huawei box with a local reseller attached, nor a claim that Interkey created every component underneath it.
- The work
- What it means
- Localisation and customisation
- Adapting the product to how networks are built and operated here: the traffic mix, the application set, and the regulatory reporting an operator owes.
- Local data collection
- The classifier is only as current as the traffic it has seen, so data is collected locally, on the applications and protocols actually in use here.
- Integrated delivery
- Deployment into a live operator network is an integration project with the policy, billing, security and reporting systems already in place. Interkey does that integration rather than handing over a box.
- Riyadh maintenance and support
- Run and supported by a Riyadh engineering team, in Arabic and English, on the Saudi working week — a call rather than a ticket queue.
Why DPI
The problem deep packet inspection solves
An operator can say how much traffic crossed its network last night. Saying what that traffic was is the harder question, and the one that matters.
Without it, congestion is diagnosed by guesswork, a policy meant to protect voice quality cannot be verified, and a security team has flow records but no idea which application produced them. Deep packet inspection answers it by classifying traffic in real time, at the rate the network actually runs at.
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When this is the wrong fit: a corporate network where flow records and firewall logs already answer the question being asked. Classification of this kind is built for operator-scale traffic and operator-scale questions; on an enterprise LAN it is an expensive way to learn what NetFlow would have told you for nothing.
Under the hood
How Interkey Intelligent DPI works
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Traffic
Inline, where it can act, or out-of-band, where it only observes; most operators start out-of-band
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Classification
Observable flow characteristics, packet sizing and timing, handshake structure, endpoint behaviour, not port numbers or payload alone
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Identified traffic
Application Protocol -
Outcomes
Real-time policy engine, per application, subscriber group or cell Reporting layer for capacity and regulatory teams
Classification is traffic-dependent: a classifier tuned on one operator’s subscriber mix will not behave identically on another’s, which is why accuracy figures always need a proof of concept against your own traffic.
On the 99% figure.
Use cases
What classification is actually for
Classification is the input; these are the decisions it feeds, and the one that decides where the platform may run at all.
- Decision
- What knowing the application changes
- Congestion and capacity
- Capacity goes where a specific class of traffic is saturating a specific part of the network, rather than everywhere.
- Policy enforcement
- Fair-use rules, tiered plans and quality-of-service commitments all depend on identifying the traffic they refer to. Without classification a policy is an intention, not a control.
- Security visibility
- Command-and-control traffic, tunnelling and traffic that does not match the application it claims to be are visible to a classifier in a way they are not to flow records. This complements a security operations capability rather than replacing it.
- Regulatory reporting
- Saudi operators report against requirements that assume the operator can describe its own traffic. DPI is usually the system that makes those reports possible.
- Where it may run
- Inspection touches subscriber data by definition. Deploying in-Kingdom, supported from Riyadh, keeps that data in the operator’s own environment and inside Saudi jurisdiction — and makes a Sunday-morning classification problem a local call.
The proof of concept
What a DPI proof of concept involves
A PoC establishes how the platform behaves on your subscriber mix, your application mix and your encrypted share — not that the product works. Three things decide whether it produces evidence you can defend internally.
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Stage 01
Acceptance criteria agreed in writing first
What is tested, on which traffic, measured how, and what counts as a pass — settled before any equipment moves. A PoC without pre-agreed criteria is a demonstration.
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Stage 02
Out-of-band first, measured against your ground truth
The platform classifies without touching the forwarding path, so nothing can degrade service. Classification is then compared against traffic you can verify independently, with the false-positive rate measured as seriously as the detection rate.
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Stage 03
Report-only policy, then the decision
Policy logic runs in report-only mode before it is real, and inline enforcement follows only once classification has earned it. The result is a number your own engineers measured.
Next step
Discuss a DPI proof of concept
A sentence on where the visibility gap sits — RAN, core or peering — and whether a live-traffic proof of concept is thinkable this year is enough to start.
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In Saudi telecommunications since 1999
The networks this platform inspects
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Huawei technology collaboration
The inspection technology behind an Interkey product
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In-Kingdom manufacturing in the group
Interkey Semiconductor, Riyadh