Delivering the Quality of Experience viewers expect is critical to IPTV success, says Brix Networks CTO
Nov 13, 2007 8:59 AM
IPTV Update: What approaches are there to monitoring that Quality of Experience?
Kaynam Hedayat: The good news is a lot of solutions are evolving. It all starts with monitoring in the core and extending it to the edge and customer network. Approach in the core and edge is monitoring of all channels and VoD streams along test channels that are injected into the network and are monitored at various locations.
In the home, the approach is deployment of algorithms and agents on the set-top box to measure QoE. The bad news is that we are still early in the evolution phase of these algorithms and agents that address the quality of experience. Standards are emerging that will allow those set-top boxes to report back into the core of the network, which will enable providers to use that information to effectively manage their business.
There are also technologies evolving that will make a network more resilient at the application layer — for example, retransmission of packets or enabling set-top boxes to provide feedback into the core of the network to be able to adapt to the network.
In monitoring QoE, one of the challenges providers have is drawing a distinction between lab tools and operational tools. What I have found in the industry is that a lot of providers try to force the tool that they have for engineering their solution into the operational network to find limitations.
For example, you purchased a $10,000 lab tool to measure the Quality of Experience in the lab in an environment to make sure your architecture is working properly. But, we find that using a $10,000 lab tool in a customer’s home doesn’t scale. Therefore, you have to rely on standards and your set-top box vendors to work with your operational monitoring tools, such as what Brix Networks offers, to get access to that information in a very scalable and seamless manner without the extra cost of hardware or deploying the hardware in the customer’s home.
Other advancements that are evolving are real-time dashboards that show IPTV providers how the service is performing across the network and the customer base. Basically, one of the challenges providers have today is the sheer number of paths they have for points of presence for distribution of television. You are talking thousands of these locations where television gets distributed to their customers.
The big question for them at the point of distribution is whether the TV core is good enough. A lot of providers today are doing that with human resources. They are deploying people. I will call them channel surfers who sit at a path and basically watch TV. If there is a problem, they pick up the home and call the NOC and say there is a problem with HBO that day.
There are technologies available to automate this process, and part of that automation is real-time dashboards that show across all of the network, across all of the locations, how the Quality of Experience is performing.
IPTV Update: How does video on demand play into the equation for monitoring Quality of Experience?
Kaynam Hedayat: With IPTV broadcast, the demands on the network are fairly fixed. You know how many channels you have. You know how many are HD and how many are SD and you can provision the bandwidth and — at least in terms of infrastructure capability — you can make sure you are going to be OK.
With video on demand, that’s no longer true because now your customers on demand are asking your network to deliver a certain amount of bandwidth, and that puts on more pressure in terms of quality of experience. That again raises the stakes as far as visibility. You definitely need to have visibility for Quality of Experience both in terms of the content and visibility. Was my video on demand available for the customer? How long did it take for that video on demand to get to my customer? And during that movie they were watching, were any impairments happening?
IPTV Update: Could you tell me a little more about the Brix Networks solutions to monitoring Quality of Experience?
Kaynam Hedayat: Our vision for monitoring is centered on Quality of Experience, with rich performance metrics at three layers — infrastructure, content and service — for troubleshooting and network management. When you look at an IPTV network in terms of monitoring, there are really three parts of the network that you want to have access to.
One is the headend. That is extremely important because what is sent into an IP network, if it is bad, is going to be replicated to thousands or even millions of customers, based on the multicast fabric. I mentioned earlier that the core, we believe, has 10 to 20 percent of the problem, but the fact of the matter is one of those problems can affect millions of customers. Our solution enables providers to have full visibility across all of their streams, be they broadcast or video on demand. Therefore, at the point of injection, you know that what you are feeding the network so you can guarantee yourself that the quality is as good as you expected.
Our solution also offers monitoring at the point of presence for the distribution layer. Again, if you think of the network as a cloud, we can ensure that what comes into the cloud is good and also what is going out of the cloud is good. That’s a powerful tool for segmentation of the network. You can immediately detect whether the core is affecting any quality across your service.
Lastly, our solution also offers software agents that can be deployed on set-top boxes and enable providers to proactively monitor the quality of experience across all of the customer base.
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