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Current Issue: Jan.-Feb. 2008
IPTV strives for quality
Service providers search for right blend of proactive monitoring
by Sean Buckley
While cell phone consumers will tolerate the occasional dropped call, when it comes to video reception at home they are, understandably, a lot more demanding. The "let’s just wait until the customer calls with a problem" mentality won’t suffice.
Sacramento, Calif.-based ILEC SureWest, which offers IPTV (both standard and high definition) over both ADSL2+ and, increasingly, FTTH, found out the hard way about not being able to rectify quickly problems with its video service. In one instance, the ILEC returned to one customer site more than 15 times but still could not identify the difficulty.
To remedy chronic customer problems, SureWest installed network probes from IneoQuest in both its internal network (i.e., headends) and at the customer set-top box (STB). For example, the IneoQuest Cricket, residing next to the STB, allows the end user to send feedback on a bad video experience by simply pushing a button on the device or on a remote control.
"As you move closer to the home, that’s where a lot of the problems are. Whether it is the last mile or within the home itself, you’re going to have issues [arising] from all kinds of different home environments. So the Crickets are perfect for that in-home experience especially [for] what we call chronic customers," says James Player, network engineering manager at SureWest. "It’s very costly to roll a truck over and over to customers [who call more than once] to figure out what’s wrong."
SureWest may not be a household name, but chronic customer problems can prevent a service provider from signing new clients and also encourage churn back to cable and satellite–a prospect that could strand the telco’s IPTV investments.
Tuning the last mile
Before IPTV or any video is extended to one home, issues with the outside plant infrastructure (e.g., copper and fiber) must be resolved and built to handle video.
Unsurprisingly, the access network choice varies among service providers. AT&T and Verizon, the two biggest U.S.-based service providers, have picked different paths for rolling out video service. AT&T advocates a fiber-to-the-node/neighborhood (FTTN) approach with VDSL2 in existing neighborhoods and FTTH in greenfield builds for its all IP-based U-Verse service, while Verizon is using FTTH for its initial RF over fiber FiOS service.
While AT&T does acknowledge FTTH as the ultimate end game, Executive Director Paul Whitehead said at last year’s TelcoTV show in Atlanta that FTTN will have enough horsepower to deliver both SD and HDTV effectively with MPEG-4 encoding.
"We do FTTN on our existing neighborhoods, and we think we have plenty of capacity to do both," he says. "MPEG-4 payload rates are dropping really rapidly in terms of what you need to do to carry HDTV. At the same time, we’re continuing to work with our vendors to decrease VDSL2 payload capacity."
Whether the service provider is rolling out IPTV service over FTTH or FTTN, problems lurk around every corner. Despite its promise of unlimited bandwidth, FTTH has created new problems never envisioned with a traditional copper-based last mile network.
Although he would not divulge specific customers, Mike Stoos, director of business development in the service assurance group for Spirent, says powering is one of many challenges FTTH has created for service providers.
"When you think about the optical network terminal on the side of the home, think about [getting] incorrect power to that box," he said. "These are things that creep up. We get power feedback as a fiber issue, but some of that could be caused by power at the home being incorrect."
No less forgiving is a telco’s copper plant, with its ability to attract noise and other unknown interferences; environmental issues can degrade a video signal quickly. When it began rolling out IPTV over ADSL2+, West Kentucky Rural Telephone found the same lines it used for traditional voice weren’t always provisioned easily for video.
"When we deployed [IPTV] this July in Kentucky, it was close to 100 degrees and our plant was having a lot of problems carrying the circuit," says CEO Trevor Bonstetter. "I spent days out there myself with the staff trying to understand why we can’t get to the customer at the loop lengths we were using. Outside plant is an issue because weather has an effect and electrical interference has an effect."
Wiring up
All the bandwidth in the network’s last mile will be meaningless if the home’s wiring is poor. In fact, poor home wiring is one of the key drawbacks to ensuring video quality.
In new housing developments, it’s pretty much a given that a service provider will work with a developer to put in brand new cabling, but in an existing home such an action could prove costly.
Taking a leverage and extend approach to the home-wiring process, AT&T is using HPNA V.3 (which uses existing copper and HFC wire), while Verizon is using MoCA (which uses existing HFC) to distribute the video and data within a home. Estimated installation costs by both service providers range from US$75 to US$100 per subscriber, depending on the time it takes the installer to get the service running at the customer site.
To be successful, AT&T’s Whitehead says IPTV needs a home network technology that can accommodate multiple STBs, and HPNA fits that bill.
"If you look at Europe, the average number of set-top boxes is 1.1, and if you go over one they have to run a Cat 5 connection around the house to get to it," he says. "All of our set-top boxes and residential gateways have a home network that’s enabled via coax or twisted pair in the house that runs on 8Mbps via the audiovisual version of HPNA. Our average customer has roughly three set-top boxes in their house."
But not everyone is convinced using existing wiring is the best video delivery approach.
EATEL, a Louisiana-based independent telco delivering RF video services over FTTH, is wiring every home it serves with Cat 5 cabling. By doing so, EATEL argues it can provide an optimal customer video experience.
"To get the full benefits of the high speeds we’re offering customers now and in the future, we typically find that the kind of wire run from the inside of the house to the side is not capable of the speeds we need, so we’re going in and running new Cat 5 cable," says Ashley Phillips, director of network engineering and operations for EATEL. "We’re spending time and some extra money at the front end to do it right, so we don’t have to go back on maintenance calls later on."
The second network challenge
Hand in hand with wiring are the devices that carry video signals throughout the home. Traditionally, the only network the service provider had to worry about was the one that carried the telephone or the data signal from the CO to the home. With all the elements required to support IPTV (e.g., STB, home router, home residential gateway), the home is yet another network for the service provider to manage.
Richard Cavin, network manager for Valley Telephone Cooperative, which has begun to roll out IPTV over FTTH and ADSL2+ in select segments of its southern Texas territory, says the nature of the home network will require technicians to weed out and become savvy about solving issues as they come up.
"A traditional telco does not put a lot of expensive customer premises equipment in the home," he says. "Maybe we put in a phone and a DSL modem. Now, we’re putting in set-top boxes, or maybe little adapters that convert from power or coax to Ethernet or maybe wireless. Now, you have a whole lot of new equipment to keep track of and a lot of complexity."
To monitor home network health, service providers can leverage standard elements, including the DSL Forum’s TR-69 standard. TR-69 defines the remote management protocol for service provisioning, troubleshooting, diagnostics, performance monitoring and firmware management within the home network.
Still, the question is how far out do you monitor the network? Should it be all the way to the home? Just in the network or all the way into the home?
While SureWest and France Telecom have advocated some form of monitoring right down to the customer premises, other IPTV providers such as Telefonica argue that monitoring down to the STB is less cost effective.
Olga Yashkova, research analyst for Frost and Sullivan, says service providers likely will remain divided on the networking monitoring issue.
Some service providers want to have monitoring up to the DSLAM because they think if there’s no problems up to that point then that would be a customer problem and they’ll have to go to the customer site and fix it anyway," she said. "Some service providers think it’s not cost effective to invest into the set-top monitoring system, but there are some that find it beneficial.
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