Delivering viable (profitable) IPTV and Video on Demand services is changing the marketplace, the technology and the network. The technical challenges involved in achieving broadcast-quality service over fixed and mobile networks are significant.

Those responsible for delivering IPTV face daunting challenges. Can your solution:

• Deliver five-nines service availability with high quality of experience (QoE)?
• Maintain high QoE for thousands of viewers in the presence of rapid channel changes?
• Correct errors caused packet loss or delay, that threaten picture quality?
• Support all components of a multiplay environment with high QoE for each?
• Quickly isolate the source of a problem in a multi-vendor solution?
• Minimize or compensate for realistic network conditions, such as latency and loss?

Failure to answer these questions in advance will result in schedule delays and performance problems that cost money and customers. In this kind of environment, everything can affect everything else. The test bed must reproduce the complexity and scale of the deployed network.

Your solution must scale, whether in bandwidth or traffic type or number of subscribers, sessions, ports, tunnels or VLANs, while maintaining throughput, QoS and security. If your test system can’t deliver this level of realism, you can’t have the assurance that the system will deliver an acceptable QoE when it is deployed.