 locations such as Facebook (the social network site) to cut down on unnecessary traffic on their networks and increase employee productivity. Don Bowman, chief technology officer at Sandvine Incorporated, was cited in the article "Flattened networks, creative pricing drives bigger DPI boxes" (Karpinski, Rich, Telephony Online, September 9, 2009). The article paraphrased Bowman's state- ment that DPI is more commonly implemented in countries with mature networks to help them manage their networks than in developing countries where the emphasis is on building new, high-speed networks, not in fine-tuning them. DPI can be used to manage traffic in the following scenarios: On a specific carrier's Internet networks Between residential customers and their carriers On mobile networks Between enterprise locations On enterprise links to the Internet Within the internal networks of an enterprises It further enables telephone companies to categorize traffic in real time to support more flexible price offerings for mobile carriers' data packages. This is an important competitive advantage, particularly in countries with more than two mobile carriers who compete on pricing and flexibility of the packages that they offer. DPI systems have the capability to exchange information with a carrier's billing system to support specialized offerings for data plans covering e-mail, songs, games, video, and web browsing. A mobile carrier might offer plans in which customers are allowed to use 300Mb of data for a fixed price, with metered pricing kicking in on anything over 300Mb. Metered pricing is a billing practice in which customers are charged by usage, rather than a flat rate, for unlimited or predetermined amounts of minutes or data bits. DPI switches tied into a carrier's network can be configured to notify a user when she has used up her plan's allotted minutes or data bits and will be henceforth charged additionally for any additional phone calls or data transmissions. Computing and Enabling Technologies How Deep Packet Inspecti