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

“Our second IPTV rollout, to include new encryption, middleware, VoD and set-top boxes, has proven to be a nightmare,” said Broyles at the time. “The sales people will say, ‘Oh yes, we will and have interoperated with all the major players,’ but we have really struggled with interoperability with all the best-of-breed vendors we chose.”

Broyles said there is certainly plenty of room for improvement and a need for different components of the IPTV ecosystem to work together. “I would caution anyone considering getting into the business to do their homework thoroughly.”

Today, Broyles offered an update on his efforts.

“We just disconnected our last customer from our first IPTV middleware provider last week,” said the now central office manager for the telco. “We are still polishing our new IPTV middleware provider, mostly enhancements. Overall, our deployment has smoothed out; however, we have one to two employees dedicated to the maintenance of our new middleware, where before it was only a very small percentage of one person’s time.”

Broyles emphasized that Ruraltel has added VoD and “the ability to service multiple regions with unique brands to our IPTV service.” It has been far from easy for the telco in the continuing evolution and broadening feature set of its video services.

Broyles is far from alone in his thoughts, observations and experiences.

“Video is hard,” said one early telco TV deployer after service rollout. That quote sums up the extra challenges brought on when it comes to testing, monitoring and dealing with video quality assurance and quality of experience.

“It’s not that telcos aren’t skilled,” said Tom Nolle, president and founder of industry consultancy CIMI Corp. “It’s just that telcos have 100 years of experience with delivering voice services, but none yet has even 10 years with telco TV.” Video and the entertainment business clearly present far more challenges than delivering VoIP and providing Internet access pipes.

Testing for Vendors

Testing is hardly confined to carrier labs, or with groups of carrier employees, as vendors perform a great deal of product testing themselves, some even doing so in the context or scenario of a multivendor and multiproduct TV ecosystem.

That’s the case with set-top box giant Amino Communications Ltd., which began many years ago providing units to some of the earliest telco TV deployers. The company has, over time, worked with a long list of partners with related products to try and make life easier for operators looking to deploy and evolve the content services.

“We have our own engineering team, quality assurance efforts and a suite of tests,” said Rick Sailor, vice president of sales, Americas, Amino. “QA runs products through integration tests with our partners in the headend segment, including Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) and Motorola Inc. (MOT), in the middleware arena and with conditional access server partners.”

The industry veteran said lab testing takes in the range of 24 to 48 days.

“We want to simulate as much as is possible in-house,” said Sailor. “Is it foolproof? Each deployment is unique. Carriers don’t always want the same combination of products that ours work with.”

Still, as is the case with TELUS, Amino takes an intermediate step between lab testing and availability that involves a group of employees putting each product and software release through its paces. “Our alpha testers are typically 10 to 40 employees who have whatever is new loaded onto their set-top boxes for two to three weeks. Anything they spot that needs to be updated or cleaned is.”

** 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. **