IneoQuest Technologies made its video network probes available to operators deploying the European Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) standards this week. The QAM Cricket quality assurance probe is used for remote monitoring of customer premises to capture and troubleshoot intermittent, reoccurring problems with their video service.
Rather than monitoring strictly the signal, the QAM Cricket allows technicians to monitor all of the services on a particular QAM signal simultaneously. It does so for multiple network scenarios such as RF broadcast video deployments, advanced video service. It helps service providers analyze, debug and resolve video quality and MPEG issues in the QAM network.
IneoQuest also provides an IP Video Management System to send real-time fault alerts to the service provider at the network operating center and allows them to determine if quality degradation on individual channels originates at the head end, in the network core or at the customer premises.
Looking at individual channels allows operators to pay more attention to services that are of added value. “Operators may not want to spend a tremendous amount of engineering time trouble-shooting an issue on a broadcast service that only 2 percent of the population is watching, when they can focus their efforts on the services that 60 percent are watching,” said Gino Dion, vice president of strategic solutions.
Dion said that finding outages in a network is easy, finding intermittent issues is what causes the most grief. “But now engineers can start looking at services as services, like HBO, rather than at a multicast address on a router as they had to in the past,” he said.
SureWest Communications in Roseville, Calif., has used IneoQuest tools to roll out is video network, which includes its own headend and seven primary hubs, which in turn support approximately 32 remote terminals. Now, Roseville uses IneoQuest’s IQPinPoint products to assure the quality of its high-definition channels.
In addition to QAM support, the Cricket comes with a 10/100 Ethernet management port analysis capabilities for USB with DVB ETR 101 and 290 MPEG.
This product, along with IneoQuest’s IQPinPoint, multi-dimensional video quality management system, helped the company grow revenue by 220 percent from 2006 to 2007 and become one of Deloitte’s fastest growing companies and opened an office in Oxford, United Kingdom. Inc Magazine also named the company as one of the top 500 fastest growing companies.
In addition to Dion, the company also added Calvin Harrison as vice president of marketing and business development and David Baranski as vice president of American sales.
Although most of IneoQuest’s business comes from the cable market for now, Dion expects IPTV service from telecom operators to drive revenue in 2008 to double again.
