No house calls necessary--here's seamless IPTV analysis

Allowing the integration of V-Factor in an STB places the capability to measure Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) performance in a user's home, yielding the best opportunity to ensure a customer is receiving the highest quality IPTV service delivery.

V-Factor technology, integrated into QoSmetrics' hardware probes for deployment in a service provider's network allows the capability to assure IPTV video and audio are performing as expected across a network with the insight, from the core, as to how a user perceives video and audio quality.

"Enabling V-Factor to be embedded in an STB is a great complement to having V-Factor-enabled performance analysis in the core network," commented Yves Cognet, Chairman of QoSmetrics. "In order to solve last mile issues related to assuring performance of IPTV between the DSLAM, for example, and an STB it is ideal to have an agent that can perform right from a user's home. Our new solution will give service providers this capability for true end-to-end QoE."

The solution also involves QoSmetrics providing an API to set top box manufacturers to hook QoSmetrics' software into the driver level of a network. V-Factor for STB is agnostic to decoder type and buffer size, allowing seamless and quick integration into all leading STB products. It requires no additional hardware integration into an STB.

Price varies by quantities and configuration and is, according to the company, barely noticeable to overall costs in just about any quantity. QoSmetrics will offer a pay-per-use model that helps STB manufacturer embed V-Factor in their STB at no cost and instead resell the technology as part of a service to those that want to deploy it. This allows STB manufacturers simple entry into the technology and greater flexibility for service providers.

The new product provides Internet Protocol (IP) Service Level Agreement (SLA) metrics such as delay, loss and jitter based on the ITU standard Y1540/1. Metrics for VoIP such as Mean Opinion Score (MOS) capabilities based on ITU G107 are included alongside Video-over-IP metrics based on QoSmetrics’ V-Factor and ETSI TR101290 metrics, as well as other Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

Engineering teams at STB manufacturers and network engineering management and quality assurance management at carriers/service providers that are deploying video applications such as IPTV and triple play (data, voice and video) applications are prime customers for QoSmetrics’' new V-Factor for STB product.

V-Factor products consisting of hardware probes and software agents are capable of pinpointing a deteriorating device or application at fault on a network for fast root-cause analysis. This allows for quick troubleshooting and repair, leading to dramatically shortened service disruptions. This integrated solution is easy to deploy and seamlessly integrates at the back end with existing Operations Support Systems (OSS) such as BMCRemedy’s ARS (Trouble Ticket) or Hewlett Packard’s SQM.