Telcos Put IPTV to the Test (Over and Over Again)

‘TELUS’ More

Like SureWest, early telco TV deployer TELUS Inc. (TU) of Canada operates a lab to cover the core functions DeMuth detailed. But CTO Ibrahim Gedeon took the effort one big step forward.

“We quickly realized that testing the telco TV middleware and switching in the lab was not sufficient,” said Gedeon. “With in-field operations [being] a critical element, we established a farm of a few hundred [set-top boxes] that is serviced through not simple lab Ethernet, but real-life DSL. That helped us with channel-change issues and more importantly with boot times and software architecture issues as related to the telco TV ecosystem.”

But Gedeon and TELUS pushed farther. “Next, to ensure proper troubleshooting of picture quality, we created a small community of over 200 users (TELUS employees), that leverage our standard broadband access but run on a different IPTV instance.”

After TELUS does its usual functional testing, followed by system testing and staging, “we put the release out to this community and soak it in a real-life environment before we push it out to all our customers.”

And Testing for All?

While the above-mentioned best practices and procedures have proven priceless for SureWest and TELUS, what of smaller, less resource-rich operators that also deployed telco TV early on? How have they survived and evolved?

Rural Telephone Co. of Lenora, Kan., was among the first U.S. operators to deploy video services to its then-limited customer base. As the name implies, the carrier is far from Tier 1 sized in its spending status, but that didn’t keep it from deploying video over DSL years ago.

The company settled on a lowest-common-denominator offering over its multivendor ecosystem to get the service deployed in a timely manner. Testing of network components was performed as well as management and monitoring once it moved from the lab into commercial deployment.

But, reflecting the state of the testing market many years ago, Rural ran into trouble in deployment. Customers were calling in to report problems with the service.

Then R&D coordinator for Rural Telephone, Shane Broyles, checked the management and monitoring systems and was surprised to find that all network elements were operating fine, green lights all around.

Stumped, Broyles dispatched a Ruraltel tech to one of the customer’s homes to literally watch the TV.

It turned out that the delivery network was all systems go, but there were problems with the video signal (and picture) that network monitoring systems couldn’t see. The carrier subsequently invested in video quality test and monitoring gear to conquer the challenge.

Roughly a year ago, however, Broyles was frustrated with the gap between what vendors promise and reality, elevating even higher the need for clarity in device interoperability and further underscoring the importance of putting promises to the test.