Ixia Moves IPTV Testing Into Active Phase

The number of truck rolls required to support IPTV and other triple-play services is proving to be far more than traditional service providers are used to. To help alleviate this burden, Ixia, provider of IP performance test systems, has launched its first triple-play active monitoring, post-deployment testing solution called IxRave.

The Remote Access Verification Engine helps address the $1,100 cost of installation and first year support that service providers are incurring by providing remote test capabilities.

Bell Canada, for instance, reduced truck rolls by 98 percent using Ixia’s product and has saved more than $3 million over the course of the service rollout. Bell Canada achieved a full return on investment in one year.

In addition to the cost associated with truck rolls that occur two to three times more often than they do for other broadband services, which in turn occur three to four times as often as traditional PSTN service calls, churn is becoming a real issue already with IPTV. Multimedia Research Group said in a recent study that 77 percent of IPTV users churn primarily because of issues related to video quality.

Ixia’s new in-service testing product addresses these issues by offering end-to-end remote quality of experience and service validation. The IxRave platform enables carriers, service providers and enterprises to actively isolate faults, verify that end-customers are receiving services and that such services are working according to service level agreements.

With IPTV subscribers expected to grow to 60.2 million by 2012, according to OSS Observer, this is a true cause for concern among service providers.

IxRave provides active, rather than passive, service validation and can do it from a central location rather than using network probes scattered across various access points. The system also provides a portal for customer service reps to access test tools for validating service remotely.

“IPTV is an emotional service. It isn’t sufficient to say we will send a technician out in a day or two,” said Neal Roche, vice president of converged monitoring at Ixia.

Roche said it was no surprise that IPTV deployments would generate a lot of service calls, but the volume of these calls was a surprise. “Operational expenditures can easily explode and put a squeeze on gross margins,” he said.

Ixia went with a centralized approach to monitoring because it is too expensive to cover the entire network with probes, Roche said. “That is not a viable system for real operational service assurance.”