BOSTON--Service providers once thought building networks with 99.999% reliability was all they needed to do, until delivering data services required them to also offer quality of service. Now IPTV is pushing them even further, requiring service providers to deliver quality of experience (QoE), Tektronix Vice President of Marketing Lyn Cantor told a Telephony IPTV Workshop audience here today.

“From a test and measurement perspective, we have significant challenges ahead of us,” he said. “In an ideal sense, it’s a matter of perfecting the formula of the consumer conundrum and finding the right balance of convenience, quality, cost and capability.”

In Cantor’s speech and a later panel discussion on the quality concerns, major issues around scalability, ease-of-use and guaranteed quality still loom for IPTV providers.

“We have been able to [provide QoS] for data, and we have seen the consumer broadband uptake on a worldwide level,” Cantor said. VoIP is right on the edge of being widely accepted by consumers, he said, as the equipment becomes more available and quality improves. But video is just beginning the process.

Unfortunately, because IPTV must compete with existing video services, there is no honeymoon period with consumers as there has been for other new services, such as mobile phones, said Mike Hollier, chief technology officer of Psytechnics.

“IPTV has a gold standard--traditional television--that needs to be met and surpassed,” said Deepesh Arora, director of applications and services testing for Ixia. “It goes beyond bits and bytes to the perception at the consumer level.”

Complicating the situation further is the fact that IPTV is not being provided as a stand-alone service but is sharing the IP pipe into the home with voice and high-speed Internet services as well, said Mike Humes, product manager, IPTV Solutions at Tektronix.

“On converged networks, you are sharing the bandwidth,” he said. “We are going to see [high-definition video] coming off the Web that will be consuming bandwidth. All the widgets – weather, traffic, etc.--that people are adding to IPTV consumer bandwidth. Service providers are sometimes dealing with this by isolating bandwidth--keeping their video separate from the Web traffic and VoIP. The problem with that is that, when the bandwidth isn’t in use, you can’t steal it to support another service.”

It becomes more important to manage the network to assure a level of quality rather than imposing artificial separations between services, he said. Service providers also have to be careful where they choose to do monitoring to make sure they can extrapolate data from multiple sources in the network, both to detect problems and to isolate them for resolution, Humes said.

Without the ability to measure the end-user’s QoE, service providers are setting themselves up for multiple types of pain, Hollier said. He cited an IPTV provider in Southern Europe that was offering refunds to customers who called to complain about quality problems after ordering content. The service provider couldn’t prove what the viewer’s QoE was and so, when word spread of the refund offer, was flooded with requests, some of which were likely to be bogus, he said. “Whatever you are going to do, you need to make sure what the QoE is, and that measurement really does relate to the end-user’s perception,” he said.

The only other option, the panel agreed, is using caller complaints as the quality control system, an approach that is costly and leads to high customer churn.

To provide more bandwidth, IPTV providers are taking advantage of new compression technologies such as MPEG-4 that squeeze more bandwidth onto copper pipes. The problem, Humes said, is that “when you increase compression, every packet becomes that much more important, and you need the networks to be more robust.”