Spirent Tests Confines of VON with IPTV Solution

The VON show is considered a VoIP event, but Spirent Communications used the venue this week in Boston to announce its IPTV Subscriber Experience Test System.

“We’re going out on a limb,” says Andy Huckridge, product marketing manager for performance analysis-broadband, who mentions that Spirent is working with SBC Communications Inc. and other big telcos on how to test IPTV.

Huckridge says IPTV presents new challenges for telcos, including the need to get a handle on bandwidth requirements for channel changing. Complicating that and other IPTV challenges, he adds, is the fact that Microsoft, which is providing the IPTV middleware to SBC and others, comes out with new releases of its IPTV software almost weekly.

The Spirent system addresses these challenges by inspecting the content of incoming video data and applies algorithms to assess video quality when the source of the reference video is unavailable. When the video source is available, the product uses a “full reference” model to report a mean opinion score and various degradation parameters like blur, blockiness and picture jitter. It can also work with no source, instead just looking at parameters of the received signal.

Also this week, Spirent unveiled the Spirent Converged Network Impairment Emulator, an enhanced version of an existing impairment emulator product, but with a time-variation element. That means service providers can get a better handle on parameters like packet loss, delay, jitter and bandwidth constriction at various points in time, rather than just providing an average over time.

Another new product from Spirent is the Abacus 100 Analog Subscriber Generator, which tests analog voice devices and switches on a large scale.

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