IPTV Testing Package Targets Fault Isolation and Troubleshooting

IneoQuest Technologies Inc. announced Monday the IP Video Quality Management System (iVMSTM), an end-to-end IPTV video quality and service assurance system that uses an interactive customer premises-based tool called Cricket.

iVMSTM provides a view into the health of an IPTV network and, the vendor said, supports rapid, practical, isolation and remote troubleshooting, enabling network operators to maintain the highest possible video quality, while helping to reduce operating expenses.

The iVMSTM covers the headend to the home and comprises server-based platform with applications that enable performance tracking and trending tools.

“Today operators are largely focused on getting their services up and running. But to scale these deployments, operators need a robust foundation of video quality management to succeed,” said Maribel Lopez, vice president at Forrester Research. “Consumers won't tolerate flaky video they way they tolerate flaky Internet downloads. Poor quality equals lost customers.”

Integrated with IneoQuest hardware probes and analyzers including Cricket, the new customer premises unit, the iVMSTM offers an efficient debugging solution for IPTV networks.

Designed to rein in rapidly increasing operating costs of existing deployments, iVMSTM also helps new deployments stay on budget by giving service providers the detailed, accurate information they need to rapidly and correctly direct maintenance resources to a problem source.

Designed for use in early IPTV field trials, service roll-outs and deployment troubleshooting, the vendor said Cricket is an appliance that lets viewers register their perception of a bad picture by simply pushing a button on the device or their remote control.

This customer action timestamps the event correlates it with all ongoing measurements that Cricket is logging, and notifies the network operations center. Alerted to a specific IPTV fault at a specific TV, the service provider can be proactive in correcting the situation, potentially leading to reduced call-center traffic volume.

Unlike traditional handheld tools that are designed to troubleshoot active problems with a technician, Cricket has been designed to accommodate the nature of IPTV and trends periodic problems over time by watching what the customer is watching in real time.

“When you combine the Cricket with the iVMS, it allows the operator to isolate the time frame of the fault, which leads to better troubleshooting of not only the problem but the location of the problem in the network,” said Teresa Mastrangelo principal analyst at Boradbandtrends.com.

IneoQuest said modeling a human's perceptive quality of experience and reporting it as a single opinion number remains elusive due to several variables including; the subjective nature of individual perception, the issues of video encryption after the encoder, the daily changing IPTV mechanisms in the emerging market, and the diverse video formats and protocols of IPTV, from HD to SD to MPEG2 to h.264.

The vendor said Cricket addresses this challenge by using what it calls the media delivery index for measuring IPTV transport quality from the headend to the home.

IneoQuest Technologies Inc. www.ineoquest.com

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