Light Reading/Cisco IPTV Scaling Test

Light Reading published an article that describes the results of an IPTV network scaling test that shows that a Cisco network can scale to support one million IPTV subscribers with QoS and resilience.

Light Reading asked the European Advanced Networking Test Center AG (EANTC) to run an end-to-end IPTV test on Cisco equipment. Cisco passed, showing its gear can handle a 60,000-user POP and, by extrapolation, a 1 million-subscriber IPTV service. It also demonstrated features such as Call Admissions Control (CAC) and Video Quality Experience (VQE).

EANTC simulated various failures and fiber breaks, and Cisco's routers managed to restore TV service in 625 milliseconds, worst case. And in QOS tests, Cisco correctly prevented the TV streams from getting disrupted when other types of traffic threatened to clog the network.

These results are interesting, but not surprising. There is little question that Cisco's routers can support IPTV networks.

The more interesting question is if this is the best architecture for IPTV. Our recent report Networking Strategies for TelcoTV Services comes to the conclusion that IPTV traffic does not fit a Layer 3 IP network well and that a Layer 1 optical network will provide a higher level of service at a lower cost. The issue is how to handle the on demand unicast traffic that everybody expects to dominate these networks. We are offering a free white paper on this subject.