Achieving broadcast-quality service over fixed and mobile networks poses significant technical challenges.
With the commoditization of voice and data, service providers are turning to IPTV to differentiate service offerings. But achieving broadcast-quality service over fixed and mobile networks poses significant technical challenges. And in order to retain subscribers, the quality of experience must be equal or surpass expectations.
What to Test
When IPTV is delivered as part of a bundle, QoE is dependent on effective traffic prioritization and minimizing or compensating for network impairments. Network latency testing should validate the following:
- Five-nines—service availability with high quality of experience (QoE)
- Effect—on voice and data
- High QoE—for thousands of viewers in the presence of rapid channel changes
- Error-correction
- Performance—under adverse network conditions, such as latency and loss
- Packet loss—across all network failure scenarios to reduce the cumulative visual effect on all subscribers
- Congestion—associated with the concurrency rate of VoD
- Service quality—while supporting security
- Time and accuracy—of channel zapping
- Latency—join, leave and interchannel latency
- Capacity—channel surfing (zap rate) capacity of the DSLAM
Spirent Solutions
Spirent’s network testing solutions help service providers improve the QoE of IPTV:
- Avalanche provides complete multi 10Gbps security, attack and IPTV performance testing, enabling users to test networks at line rate speeds to simulate daily business traffic and understand the impact of network faults and attacks
- Abacus tests scalability, performance, interoperability and voice quality for voice prior to and during deployment
- Spirent TestCenter Live ensures SLA conformance and world class performance of Ethernet applications and networks
- Professional Services - Enterprise OnDEMAND On-Site Performance Testing detects and mitigates problems before you launch any new infrastructure or IT solution
- Support Services ensure that system technology is always current and operating at maximum performance
