Delivering IPTV requires the integration of many different pieces, so it's little wonder that IPTV implementation challenges are as numerous and diverse as those pieces. And asking individuals involved in the process to name those challenges is much like the old story of the blind men and the elephant — implementers tend to see the specific problems staring them in the face.

Many of those problems were addressed within the last year, as IPTV began to hit the real world in tens of thousands of lines, but there are still major issues looming before this complex offering is easily delivered to the mass market.

“IPTV is not ready to go to millions,” said Deepesh Arora, product line manager for data, security and video at Ixia, which does IP performance testing. “There are still tremendous challenges in being able to manage bandwidth. Every new user is consuming Megabits per second that need to get provisioned. The interactivity of the traffic that is being carried is extremely complex, and the challenge is huge. Being able to manage all that traffic has an impact on the quality of the video, which has an impact on the user experience and your business.”

Given the progress already made on the IPTV front, however, and the billions invested by telecom providers globally, there is also good reason for confidence in what is to come. Here, as they say on TV, in no particular order, is a look at those challenges, past and future.

IPTV pioneers in the U.S. — mostly independent telcos — got started using MPEG 2 technology, which was proven at that point, said Rick Sailor, vice president of sales for set-top maker Amino. “The MPEG 2 stuff came together very well, primarily because the satellite and cable guys had been doing it for 15 years,” he said.

But to extend the reach of their service over copper networks and to deliver high-definition programming, service providers had to make the leap to MPEG 4. That's where they got stuck, waiting.

“For the last six to nine months, the hardest part has been waiting on the MPEG 4 encoders and set-top boxes,” Sailor said. Amino's MPEG 4 box will be generally available by the first of July, he said.

There is still reason for caution, however, said Marlis Humphrey, director of strategic marketing for IPTV and mobile TV for Harris.

“MPEG 2 went through quite a few years of ongoing improvement,” she said. “With MPEG 4, we finally have stable silicon. You will hear wonderful stories of great picture quality at very low bit rates. What you have to watch for is that with high definition, things look too good to be true. Ninety percent of the content may look good all the time, but 10% may need more bits than you are willing to spend. You have to make trade-offs of how low [in terms of bandwidth] you want to go.”

This was a challenge no one could avoid, but it hit smaller companies hardest. AT&T and Verizon went about the painstaking business of signing content providers one by one. AT&T signed 150 contracts in a year-and-a-half, said Dan York, head of programming for AT&T, who says that process was the hardest part of delivering its U-verse IPTV service.

“We have had to significantly compress the deal cycle that network groups, [sports] leagues and studios typically operate under,” he said. “It's not uncommon for a network group to take well over a year to do a renewal.”

Smaller telcos weren't in a position to get that kind of attention, and when the National Cable Television Cooperative stopped taking new members, many of them were left out in the cold. The good news here is that there are now other options. One is from the National Rural Telephone Cooperative (NRTC), which teamed with SES Americom to offer an end-to-end service that includes programming and is selling a content-only version as well to telecom players that have their own IPTV transport and delivery systems, said Tanya Sullivan, vice president of corporate relations for the NRTC.

“We offer rural utilities an option other than going to programmers directly, which is an expensive and time-consuming process for them,” she said.

A big part of the integration challenge, Sailor said, is for telecom service providers to learn both parts of the IPTV business — the IP part and the video part.

“Service providers know tip and ring, they know if they have forty-eight volts or not, but now they have to deal with knowing packets — where do they get lost and how do they get lost and how do you go about finding them,” he said. “It's a transition in technology. They have ended up dedicating people to the project, they have hired people with data and Ethernet knowledge to put it together themselves. You look at a company like SureWest [Communications, an IPTV pioneer], and here they were building a jigsaw without knowing what the picture looked like.”

Just a year ago, it was almost impossible to pull together all the pieces into an IPTV ecosystem that worked even for demonstration purposes, said Geoff Burke, director of field marketing for access gear-maker Calix.

“It has become much easier to create that ecosystem now, with many of the piece parts, like MPEG 4 set-top boxes, more readily available,” he said.

Currently, IPTV is reaching hundreds of thousands of customers in Hong Kong, in mainland China and in Europe, but there still are concerns about what happens when these same networks crawl toward the million mark.

The scalability challenges will affect every part of the network because every job becomes harder to do in volume, said John Reister, chief IPTV architect for BigBand Networks. “There are challenges at the customer premises, making sure everything is hooked up, there are the typical customer service and support issues and dealing with getting things installed,” he said. “The bandwidth continues to be a challenge — as you scale up and get more activity between the [electronic programming guide] servers and the set-tops and channel changes — with more of that control traffic going on, quality can be affected.”

As new subscribers come on, responsiveness may go down, which will create quality of experience issues for users, he said. Service providers will be challenged to go from today's centralized system to a more distributed one that pushes some processing capability closer to the edge, Reister said.

They may also be challenged to do something they had trouble doing in the early days of DSL — turn down business. “The question will be, in IPTV, how willing are carriers going to be to say, ‘No,’ when someone has marginal access, where you are going to be dropping packets,” he said. “Are you going to turn down those customers and what percentage of your customer base does that involve?”

Service providers are going to have to be smarter — or have smarter networks — to address the challenge of when to say no, said Suraj Shetty, senior director of service provider marketing at Cisco Systems.

If a network has been designed to serve a neighborhood of 1000 homes, and allow those homes to watch 50 channels concurrently, then “the network has to be smart enough to understand that when a request comes in for the fifty-first channel on that network, letting that fifty-first channel come in will degrade everyone's service,” he said. “It will send a signal back to the user that says, ‘We are out of bandwidth right now, please try later.’ You gracefully handle over-subscription on your network.”

One of the key issues for IPTV in its early days is the fact this is a new service in a mature market. Cable and satellite companies have been delivering high-quality video entertainment for years. That's why it's important that IPTV players deliver a quality experience. This is, to some extent, an extension of the scalability challenge, because most of the problems occur as service providers add new customers.

“It's great to get the service up and running, but often they really don't know when their users are experiencing good or bad quality,” said Laura Holly, director of video service assurance for Brix Networks. Because IPTV is the sum of diverse parts, including content acquisition, transport, intermediate distribution points and customer location, early deployments were plagued by the inability to determine if problems were occurring and where.

“For service assurance to really shine, you need to have the capability to correlate information across space and time and other [information] repositories,” she said. “You don't want to send a truck out to a customer's house if the problem is an upstream solution.”

Brix has developed probes that sit at different points in the network and provide the necessary information and the correlation, something SingTel currently is using for its IPTV service.

Psytechnics, a spinoff of BT, has created software that can be deployed in an IPTV service that actually measures the end user's view of quality, said Mike Hollier, chief technology officer of the company. Based on testing of thousands of real people in the lab environment, the company built a set of “computer programs which model how human sense works,” he said.

The software has been used by European service providers that are concerned about low customer adoption rates or quality of experience problems as more customers are added, Hollier said.

But there are other key aspects to quality of experience that are new to IPTV players, such as understanding the transport chain for video, said Harris's Humphrey.

“It is important to understand what the whole transport chain is in regards to programming, such as where the programming is coming from,” she said. “You need to negotiate appropriately so you don't compress too early.”

Rather than ask a supplier to deliver service as more highly compressed MPEG 4 signals, it may make more sense to use MPEG 2 compression “where you have the luxury of large transport pipes,” and only compress further in the skinnier access portion of the network, she said.

Service providers also need to think about pushing intelligence deeper into their networks to manage them in a different way, said Rahul Sachdev, vice president of marketing for Intelliden.

“In a core network, when you are provisioning bandwidth, you set up a label-switched path,” he said. “Say you have a tunnel [label switched path] for 300 MB/s from node A to node B, and you reach 80% of that capacity during peak hours. You have already used up 240 Mb and you want to make a decision to resize that [label switched path] in real time, based on some sort of a policy. If you don't, everybody will get 1% degradation for each customer you add. If you can't resize that [label switched path], you want to tell that customer, I can't serve you now.”

Every new service needs quality customer care, but IPTV poses particular challenges to the traditional customer-care system of the telecom industry, said David Sharpley, vice president of product marketing and alliances for Oracle's communications global business unit.

“A couple of things make IPTV different,” he said. “For the typical carrier service, the network is the service. In the IPTV scenario, media services are using the network. This is about media and content riding over that network where quality is going to have an impact on service delivery. There are a lot of requirements around content management and [digital rights management].”

Chiefly, those issues include settlements associated with delivering someone else's content over a service provider's network, he said.

But there are also the traditional issues around customer care, including provisioning and billing accurately and quickly.

Getting orders entered correctly and getting service orders entered correctly are typical challenges in IPTV, Sharpley said. “Order fallout rates on such a complex service go up, which has a huge impact on customer satisfaction, which means customer care calls go up, and there is increased churn,” he said.

Oracle's approach has been to build Intelligent Change Management to enable service providers to accurately track changes made to service orders. The need to move quickly also is pushing service providers to leverage off-the-shelf software, as opposed to building internal proprietary systems as they often did in the past.

TOP 10 COUNTRIES BY IPTV SUBSCRIBERS

Service provider	Subscribers	Penetration
France	1,410,000	10.17%
Hong Kong	920,000	55.93%
China	720,625	1.29%
Spain	427,600	6.07%
Japan	304,000	1.14%
Taiwan	269,000	6.04%
Italy	211,700	2.46%
Holland	167,500	3.26%
Belgium	149,491	6.39%
Sweden	145,000	6.11%
Source: Dittberner

ONLINE

Security is another implementation concern for IPTV, and you can read “Content protection a key IPTV challenge,” which provides more information about those challenges on our Web site.
www.telephonyonline.com/itpv