** For more stories on IPTV and various testing methodologies, read the full eBook “Uptime Guarantees Begin with Upfront Quality Assurance,” sponsored by Mu Dynamics, at www.xchangemag.com/mudynamics. **
If you think deploying IPTV ends with the purchase of all the software and hardware components that make up the long, complex and tightly interrelated delivery and support ecosystem, think again.
Telco TV deployers have taken rigorous pre-testing measures in laboratories, and with employees as guinea pigs, to ensure their video service and enhancements don’t collapse the fragile IPTV foundation that has been prone to failures.
Just as R&D employees in most any industry wouldn’t let anything out of the lab until it has been thoroughly tested to work as anticipated, telco management has, and continues to take, the same approach with TV services.
Testing, for Sure
IP services innovator SureWest Communications (SURW), which serves customers in the Sacramento, Calif. area with triple-play bundles and beyond, is a prime case in point.
“Offering converged voice, data and video services usually involves the integration of a variety of vendor solutions and the ongoing operation of several disparate systems,” said Bill DeMuth, SureWest’s CTO and senior vice president. “SureWest is fortunate to have an advanced lab that allows us to integrate and test all of our services in a lab environment versus our production network. Through the initial product design to the actual integration and testing, our lab personnel are involved to ensure that the products or services we are implementing will meet the demands of our customers, and that they can be deployed as seamlessly and realizable as possible.”
The CTO strongly emphasized the lab work for IPTV doesn’t end with service deployment and extends far beyond inter-product testing.
“The initial integration of our IPTV and FTTH systems is just one aspect of our ability to deliver converged services,” explained DeMuth. “The ongoing operations, upgrading, regression testing, interfacing to OSS systems, etc., is where our lab becomes an invaluable tool that provides us the ability to deliver differentiated and highly reliable services to our customers.”
This IP services pioneer stresses that the SureWest lab also fills a critical role in post-deployment, service assurance challenges.
“The lab is not only used to integrate and test products prior to release, it is also an important tool that allows us to investigate and troubleshoot anomalies that may be reported by customers, but that might be hard to replicate and fix in a production environment,” DeMuth explained. “The lab systems also give us the capability to upgrade systems or implement software patches in a test environment prior to customer trials or live deployment.”
These abilities are invaluable because of the changing nature of any IP service ecosystem, which typically features a reliance on software smarts from middleware — with new versions continually becoming available — and new features/capabilities supported from set-top boxes and outside plant upgrades.
“The lab environment is as close to the ‘real-world’ live customer environment as we can get. Oftentimes, vendors cannot replicate some of the issues we may be seeing with our services within their own labs,” noted DeMuth in reference to the product testing that individual vendors do before clearing a product for sale to carriers. “With our labs we can completely replicate our production network with the complete ecosystem of systems and services, and therefore can usually better isolate or replicate reported troubles.”
