Video quality can make or break IPTV service, but providers may need to think harder about how to ensure they can provide that quality

IPTV providers know they must provide a quality video experience to compete with established video players such as cable and satellite, but knowing for certain what each individual customer is seeing has proved to be a bigger challenge than service providers might have anticipated.

In fact, a recent survey of 12 IPTV providers by Multimedia Research Group, commissioned by Symmetricom, found that in more than 90% of cases, service providers first learned customers were having problems when they called to complain. Letting customers be canaries in the coal mine, so to speak, is risky on multiple fronts.

First, unhappy customers can create higher churn rates, something telcos can't afford. In MRG's survey, 77% said video quality is the main reason for customer churn. Second, the cost of customer service goes up with the number and severity of complaints.

Gary Schultz, author of the MRG report on the survey, believes the alternative is investing more money up in technology that will enable IPTV companies to proactively monitor the customers' quality of experience (QOE).

“Not very many companies are budgeting in this area — it is a hidden cost, and they are not quite sure what it is,” Schultz said. “Management ought to budget a per-subscriber allocation of $3 to $10 as a way of making sure the [quality of service]/QOE infrastructure grows and expands with the footprint of the architecture.”

The good news, Schultz said, is that there are many options for monitoring QOE, and more companies are entering this market. The bad news, according to multiple industry sources, is that while standards for monitoring IPTV networks are emerging — in the U.S. from Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions and the DSL Forum and globally from the ITU — there is no single standard for doing this and so no guarantee of multivendor solutions.

That leaves each IPTV provider to determine its own strategy, which is difficult, Schultz said. “The biggest challenge, or at least one of them, is to understand what your needs are going to be based on your services, not just today but in the future,” he said. “What we try to do is map out a road map. If you are doing basic or intermediate services today, where might you be going in the next three to five years? How does that impact your architecture — the quality of service/quality of experience architecture?”

Video is much more susceptible to problems than voice data, a reality compounded by the amount of new equipment being deployed for IPTV services and the very high customer expectations that exist, said Gary Croke, director of marketing for Symmetricom, which makes end-to-end video monitoring solutions.

“Video can react very differently to a network situation than would other services,” Croke said. “Ten milliseconds of information loss in a data service is virtually undetectable. There won't be a service impact. In [voice over IP], 10 milliseconds is 90 bytes of data. Most VoIP standards for failover are 50 milliseconds. But 10 milliseconds of [high-definition] video is 10,000 bytes of data. My user is going to see [that loss] in a huge way. If I am running voice and data on my network and it is all running well, the minute I put HD video on there, I'm going to see problems I never knew I had. That is what is creating some of the challenges for delivery of video over the Internet.”

As providers deploy new equipment, there always will be kinks to work out, Croke said: “This prompts the need for doing a better job in some of this monitoring effort and build it in from the start and not make it an afterthought for IPTV service.”

SureWest Communications, an IPTV pioneer, places Cricket monitors from IneoQuest at each point in the network where the video signal is handed off, beginning at the headend.

“We monitor at every point in the network,” said James Player, network engineering manager for SureWest. “We monitor at the headend to make sure the content providers are providing us with the best quality of picture, because if there's something wrong, the consumer will see it and assume it's our fault. Then we monitor in the core of our network and every hop out to the customer.”

At this stage, the cost of probes is too high to monitor in the home, Player said, even though that is where many problems occur. The wide variety in the quality of home wiring has led many IPTV providers, including AT&T and SureWest, to install their own Cat-5 wiring in homes when possible, even if this leads to much longer installation times.

Sometimes, however, installation of new wiring isn't possible or desired by the homeowner when it can't be hidden easily in an accessible crawl space or attic, Player said.

“In that situation, we use [Home Phone Networking Alliance] over the existing wiring,” he said. The problem is that HPNA has to be done over virtually flawless wiring to deliver a good IPTV signal, Player said.

When problems become chronic, SureWest will put an IneoQuest probe in the home to diagnose the problem, he added.

“We put a probe out there and see if there is any packet loss or drops, due to the fiber going to the house having low light, for example,” Player said. “We can't remotely look at; we have to put a meter on it. The video will drop packets if it is that low. Or there might be out-of-order packets — because this is IP-based, they may go through different routes in the network. The set-top box will put it back in order if the packets are in that buffer. But if they are not, then you will have missing frames, which causes tiling.”

Going forward, the effort made to protect QOE also can be used as a service differentiator, not only for providing higher-quality video but also for leveraging IPTV's two-way capabilities, said Chris Merrit, chief marketing officer for Operax, which sells monitoring and policy-control gear to IPTV players such as BT, France Telecom and Telecom Italia.

By establishing policies on a per-user basis, service providers not only can protect their network from being overly taxed, but also guarantee quality for specific applications, such as videoconferencing for teleworkers by day and HD video in the evenings, he said.

“IPTV is going through different generations of maturity,” Merrit said. “It was initially a replication of cable; now IPTV needs to explore the interactivity that IP enables. Things like screen-in-screen, multiview, interactivity with other applications — blog as you watch “The Sopranos” with your friends — the more of these you have, the better the service, but also the more different capacity demands that the service provider needs to be able to control.”

Player would like to see the probe capability now used independently become integrated into set-top boxes and residential gateways to enable customer problems to be more easily diagnosed remotely so that when customers call in, deciding to roll a truck can be a more accurate choice.

“The last thing we want to do is roll a truck when the problem is power within the home,” Player said. “There are some new technologies coming where we can remotely monitor HPNA — we want to integrate that into the residential gateway and the set-top box. The HPNA is a Layer 2 bridge network, so it doesn't get an IP address and we can't get to it. When you put [monitoring] into a gateway or a set-top that can access the HPNA network, you can see all kinds of metrics on signal-to-noise ratio.”

That capability will give providers a cost-effective view of the home and a true picture of what their customers see.