IneoQuest, a five-year-old test solutions company based in Mansfield, Mass, introduced a premises-based quality assurance solution for IPTV this week as well as an end-to-end video management system.

With no current cost-effective way of determining the quality of IPTV service from the customer’s perspective, service providers could use IneoQuest’s Singulus Lite solution, also known as Cricket, in field trials, service rollouts and service troubleshooting.

Cricket is a monitoring, analysis and remote troubleshooting appliance that allows IPTV viewers to register their perception of a bad picture by pushing a button on either the device or on their remote control. This provides a timestamp of a service degradation, which a technician or network operations center personnel can use to correlate it with issues in the network.

“You can’t be chasing around amorphous issues. We are measuring live video over long periods of time because that is the nature of the problem we are dealing with. You need to give those guys realistic views of what’s happening,” said Marc Todd, president and CEO of IneoQuest.

The device comes in 10 Mb/s and 10 Gb/s probes, which can be used at the head-end, the network edge or in a user’s home.

IneoQuest uses a Media Delivery Index, which it co-authored with Cisco Systems, for measuring IPTV transport quality rather than a model for human perception, which it considers elusive at best due to its subjectivity and other technical factors including encryption and evolving delivery platforms.

“A lot of the issues we have seen have been around loss. It’s the big issue with IPTV,” Todd said. “If the payload out of the video head-end is bad, then it’s bad anywhere and that’s easy to identify. The real problem is getting those packets all the way down through your core network, down the edge network, across the DSL and into the home network and then determining where there’s loss.”

Using the MDI capabilities of Cricket, service providers can capture actual viewer feedback of IP Video quality, validate IPTV transport quality at the customer premises, utilize remote troubleshooting of IPTV problems, speed problem resolution by eliminating truck rolls and establish interaction with the user.

The Cricket technology is supported by IneoQuest’s IP Video Management System (iVMS), which also was announced today and provides a real-time view into the health of the entire IPTV Network. It also enables isolation and remote troubleshooting. Features of the iVMS include: real-time IPTV Network status, Google Maps integration, topological view of probe locations, MDI compliance, long-term fault tracking and direct access to troubleshooting tools such as IQMediaAnalyzer and IQTSX.

Todd said that the time is right to hit the market with these solutions because all the big players are revving up their deployments.

“Around 2002 to 2003 it was pretty clear to us that quality and service assurance monitoring systems would be required, but the market wasn’t there yet,” he said. “So our plan was to design a flexible tools set to keep up with emerging standards. Even today, every month or so you get a new version of an encoder or an add/insertion device and the protocol changes. Now with the roll out of IPTV across the board with major telcos, it’s going to swamp everybody. That’s why we’re bringing these products to market now.”

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