Symmetricom Video Nightmares

Symmetricom has put up a short video that demonstrate 10 common digital video quality problems.

It is worth viewing and the commercial at the end is not intrusive. I have experienced all of these problems using over the air digital.

Alcatel-Lucent Improves IPTV Network Architecture

Alcatel-Lucent announced improvements to its Triple Play Service Delivery Architecture (TPSDA) that includes:

• Increased capacity and density
• Policy enforcement with per-subscriber resolution
• The equivalent of 19.2 million queues per telecom rack, which enables more fine-grain service control to ensure each service is delivered with the appropriate Quality of Experience (QoE) and uses network resources in the most efficient manner
• PPPoE termination, which facilitates the smooth migration of legacy networks to TPSDA
• A reporting and analysis system which provides tools to warehouse, aggregate and process per subscriber application-level statistics

Alcatel-Lucent's TPSDA has been successful and fifty service providers globally have adopted it along with Alcatel-Lucent products, including AT&T in the U.S. TPSDA is providing more granular control over flows in order to assure QoE. Zeugma is attacking the same problem with its new system.

These architectures will clearly be important for insuring QoE for VoIP and mobile services. It is still not clear to me that it will be effective for IPTV traffic as IPTV moves from a broadcast/multicast approach to an on demand/unicast approach. Unicast TV will saturate these networks and be quite difficult to manage using packet based techniques.

Zeugma Introduces Service Delivery Router

Zeugma, a Vancouver based start up, has introduced a service delivery router that combines deep packet inspection with the ability to support applications in a single box. Its objective is to support the deployment of value added services over broadband networks including managed Telco IPTV services and unmanaged over the top Internet TV and video.

Zeugma's market research indicates that more than 75 percent of the people surveyed are interested in buying or renting movies over the Internet. This research also indicates that people are not willing to pay much to begin watching the movie in a few minutes rather than waiting to download the entire movie first. While more than 55 percent would pay an extra $.25, only 40 percent would pay an extra $1.00 for a more immediate experience. On the other hand, more than 60 percent would be willing to watch a 30 second ad for the more immediate service. Zeugma stated that this shows that improved QoS can increase revenues.

The company states that its product's application awareness facilitates the classification of traffic. Its bandwidth manager can allocate or deny resources. It manages QoS and bandwidth on a per subscriber and per flow basis.

Zeugma's system is under evaluation at several major carriers including at BT.

Service management is clearly an important issue for broadband service providers. I don't think that best efforts will be adequate as the number and importance of these services increase.

However, the difficulties of managing video, especially Telco IPTV video should not be underestimated. We published a report Networking Strategies for TelcoTV Services that examines these issues in detail. You can request a free white paper on this subject.

Our conclusion was that as video on demand, replay TV, and other unicast forms of content from managed IPTV services will overwhelm broadband networks with video traffic. We half jokingly state that QoS will not work in this environment because there will not be enough low priority packets to discard.

While the effectiveness of the Zeugma and other similar system may be questionable for video traffic, especially for managed services, I think that they will be key for other services, especially for VoIP. I expect that they will be important on 4G mobile networks where all services, including voice, will be delivered over packet networks.

Mirimon Measures the Viewer's Video Experience

Also at NAB I sat down with Paul Tinkler, CEO and David Richards, outside Director of Mirifice. This company offers agent software that sits in a set-top box and measures the video quality of experience of the viewer. This agent in the set-top box sends alarms to a central management system that makes the operator aware of the problem. This system can be used to identify and resolve problems before the viewers are aware of them. It is also used to identify whether the problem is unique to a single user or is common to a number of users and caused by a failure in a network element. This system can be applied to both cable and IPTV systems.

Comstar in Russia will deploy the Mirifice agent on its Amino set-top boxes. Comstar plans to start by putting the agent in 100 thousand IPTV set-top boxes but plans to expand that number rapidly.

Tinkler believes that this agent will be an important tool for the technical support representatives that will increase satisfaction and decrease churn. He has found that there is a high correlation between the level of dissatisfaction and the propensity to change service providers. The happy customers tend to stay where they are.

The other video quality of experience systems that I have seen focus on network issues. I have always felt that measuring the video quality of experience at the viewer's home was key. The problem resolution process should work back from there. Obviously monitoring the network is important, but if the operators do not know what the viewer is seeing, they do not really know what is going on.

Shenick Launches IPTV Monitoring Capabilities

Shenick launched its IPTV network monitoring products earlier this month. I just had an interview with them today. Shenick's servicEye products provides the following functions for monitoring IPTV networks:

• servicEye provides monitoring capabilities at the head end of the network on pre and post IPTV encoding stages .
• Active probe functions with full reference video analysis for detailed video analysis. The active probe also provides a multi-application traffic injection capability that enables service providers to emulate and analyze network and application layer traffic.
• servicEye monitors both variable bit rate (VBR) and constant bit rate (CBR) video streams for SD, HD TV and picture-in-picture (PiP) TV with encrypted and non encrypted video payloads.

Shenick's systems are generally used in carrier IPTV labs to test IPTV systems. They are also used to prove out newly installed networks. These monitoring products take the next step and move Shenick into operational networks. Shenick stated that it expects that its products will be used in the headend to monitor video traffic at the source and at the access nodes to monitor video traffic as it enters the access network and is delivered to the viewer.

These kinds of products are key to the success of IPTV services. IPTV Service providers are starting to see churn due to dissatisfaction with video quality. These carriers have to be able to consistently deliver a high level video experience in order achieve the levels of success that they are looking for.

Cisco Introduces IPTV SLA

Cisco has introduced an IPTV SLA that is explained at this link. It provides monitoring of the IPTV broadcast flows through the IP network and delivers quality measurements, channel mapping, and route path analysis. It couples the multicast protocol with the video channel lineups in a monitoring system. It provides problem isolation by offering a common platform for network and video operators.

Cisco's IPTV SLA includes:

• IPTV Multicast Flow Tracing, which isolates IPTV multicast flows to the network segments responsible for transmission.
• IPTV Video-Quality Measurements for loss and latency that will result in video artifacts. This video measurement is correlated with the multicast IPTV flow tracing for problem correlation.
• IPTV Channel Mapping, which reports the channels that are carried in a multicast flow through the network in order to determine the impact of anomalies in the IPTV transport network.
• Health Checks based on rules created on a per flow basis. Violations to this rule set, such as path or pps, will result in notification to the network operator.
• IPTV-Related Multicast Flows, which automatically finds related multicast flows carrying similar video content to help operators isolate problems and determine their impact.
• Integrated Router Statistics provide multicast diagnostics is provided on a per-flow basis, including router and switch statistics.
• Northbound Notification, which integrates with the service provider's service manager applications by providing northbound trap notifications of IPTV flow alerts.

It appears that Cisco is providing some important capabilities for monitoring IPTV traffic. From this description, it is focusing on the network layer. Other approaches, such as those offered by Brix, Ineoquest, and Bridge Technologies provide monitoring at the video layer by decoding the MPEG packets and identifying the visual impact directly.

I think that Cisco's IPTV SLA is a useful tool, but I also think that video layer monitoring on an end-to-end basis will also be required to get a full picture of video quality.

Brix Provides 10Gbps Monitoring

Brix has introduced the ability to monitor IPTV and VoIP on 10 Gbps Ethernet links. The new Brix 4100 provides real time monitoring of live customer IPTV traffic of video service quality across transport, and signaling systems, which is designed to allow operations and customer care issues to be proactively addressed.

Monitoring and system assurance are key issues in IPTV networks. The TelcoTV operators need to be able to monitor their services on a customer by customer basis to provide high quality of service.

Brix and Hwacom Add Quality Agent

Hwacom has integrated Brix Networks' IPTV Quality Agent into its HC-100 set-top box, which gives service providers the ability to collect video performance information, metrics, and provides at-home visibility into IPTV services. This quality agent can be used for operational, troubleshooting and customer care applications.

This is one of the first examples of what should be an important trend. The service provider needs visibility into the quality of an IPTV service as experienced by the viewer. This has to be done in the set-top box. This will enable the service provider to monitor the home network as well as the broadband network.