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NewsGlobe: Today's News
Cable ready to fight for home turf as well
QoE, not QoS, is key to video delivery success
by Jim Barthold
The telecommunications battleground has moved inside the subscriber
home. Every provider expects to deliver a reliable signal to the side of
the home; once inside, though, it’s a donnybrook and the provider with
the best signal to the most devices with the greatest Quality of
Experience (QoE) wins.
“QoE absolutely needs to be assured and measured at the house,” says
John Burnham, vice president of marketing at Brix Networks.
Measuring quality of experience rather than the quality of service (QoS)
will be the deciding factor for subscribers who may tolerate some
problems with their phone and data services but who will go ballistic if
pixels and audio dropouts start marring the quality experience on their
50-inch plasma HDTVs.
(see Sizing Up The IPTV Experience and IPTV 2007: Merit In Being Pipe Provider, Says Accenture)
“Picture quality is a tough one. If you want to test picture quality you
can test picture quality. You take an image, send it through a network,
look at that image on the other end and bit by bit it should be the
same,” says Eric Presworsky, vice president of advanced technology and
product management at Zhone.
“That’s good but not very realistic.”
Voice quality is generally assured via a subjective MOS (Mean Opinion
Score) test. Video is equally subjective. But the video experience is
ongoing and MOS, while effective, is a bursty test for a bursty service.
For now cable is most likely the MOS yardstick for video entertainment--the standard against which other video delivery is measured.
Satellite managed to grab a foothold in video entertainment by besting analog
cable with a digital screen. Telcos hope to do the same with high
definition.
Nobody, however, can afford to roll a truck to every
subscriber complaining about a less-than-stellar picture. At the same
time, nobody can afford to have that high-end subscriber drift to the
competition.
Because video quality is subjective, technology, no matter how
advanced, is no substitute for a viewer’s eyes. To ensure picture quality
a provider must roll a truck with a technician aboard for about $100 to
$200, incurring an expense for something that may not even be
happening in the home.
IneoQuest proposes to reduce that operating expense with a model that
pinpoints problems outside the home before trucks have to roll to the
home.
MSOs “have high definition problems; they have macro blocking on the
screen and they don’t really know why,” says Calvin Harrison, vice
president of marketing at IneoQuest. “They (remotely) reset the set-top
box, go into the network and reset the edge QAM (and then) send a
truck to the house.”
That final part, Harrison says, is “unbounded op ex.”
“Our big forte for video management, fault isolating and troubleshooting
… is from headend to last-mile. Instead of looking at issues in the
routers, we provide a vision of CNN and HBO from the headend to the
home. You’re saving these companies massive op ex because they’re not
sending a truck to a customer’s home when the issue is in the headend
somewhere,” he says.
IneoQuest’s expertise, like the service provider’s influence, is moving into
the home where the vendor is developing QAM units to measure
networks feeding the normal wireline devices as well as the more exotic
and growing number of mobile and wireless end points.
(see IneoQuest Manages IPTV QoS at the Source)
“Our philosophy is it isn’t just video to your TV set over cable; it’s
mobility. It’s not about RF signal strength to your handset, it’s about
video quality,” he says.
The ultimate endgame is to eliminate truck rolls, but if a truck roll is necessary
being able to identify and repair the home network blip that’s degrading
the video signal will be key to curbing repair costs.
“People spend billions to roll this stuff out and yet they don’t have any
way of solving the problems or the unbounded op ex that occurs from
truck rolls,” he says. “A percentage of your capital equipment cost
should be for monitoring management faults, isolating and
troubleshooting and, if you can use the same equipment to do all those,
all the better.”
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