The flows are in those boxes, but only for stats purposes exported with NetFlow/IPFIX/sFlow/etc. Apparently it was not as fast as they liked it to be and there where other issues. Thus what exactly is new here in his boxes that has not been tried and failed before?
Roberts is selling a product to put in at the edge of your WAN to solve packet loss problems in the core network. Since most ISPs don't have packet loss problems in the core, but most enterprise networks *DO* have problems in the core, I think that Roberts is selling a box with less magic, and more science behind what it does. People seem to be assuming that Roberts is trying to put these boxes in the biggest ISP networks which does not appear to be the case. I expect that he is smart enough to realize that there are too many flows in such networks. On the other hand, Enterprise WANs are small enough to feasibly implement flow discards, yet big enough to be pushing the envelope of the skill levels of enterprise networking people. In addition Enterprise WANs can live with the curse of QoS, i.e. that you have to punish some network users when you implement QoS. In the Enterprise, this is acceptable because not all users have the same cost/benefit. If flow switching lets them sweat their network assets harder, then they will be happy. --Michael Dillon