Oh, it's obviously possible. Reading a little about Narus does not give me the impression that it's cost-effective, for any non-NSA sense of the word "cost". In any case, in my opinion our customers were not taking their problems very seriously, and their price sensitivity reflected that.

If you have any trustworthy source of ballpark pricing for a 10Gb/s DPI solution, Narus or otherwise, I'm curious. I'm talking BALLPARK here.

I looked up some of Narus's whitepapers, and what I'm seeing looks like Grade A Bullshit. That doesn't mean they ARE bullshit -- their whitepapers would look like this in either case. But I would like to point out that it is absolutely possible to build a company like this without actually delivering the goods, because many of your potential customers are largely incapable of understanding whether or not the goods have really been delivered.

ALSO, I guess I should remember that DPI for stopping malware, and DPI for spying on citizens, are really different things. When you're spying on citizens, 90% effectiveness is good enough. When you're trying to block malware (versus e.g. commited cyberterrorism), 90% is a little better than 0%, but not much, because your adversary can try many times and they only have to succeed once. So in that sense, the DPI being discussed here is a much easier problem than the DPI that we were trying to tackle.

well, i think you can look up the pricing for gateway nodes for cellular wireless equipment vendors (hspa/umts/lte/cdma etc.). my guess is that it should somewhere around 200-400k range. a sufficiently capable box can handle approx. 7 - 10m subscribers simultaneously doing data.

any cellular network that you send data on, already does this. standardization only levels the playing field.