Ixia goes end-to-end on IPTV quality

Ixia today announced an end-to-end triple-play quality assurance system that the IP performance testing company has been developing with Bell Canada for more than two years. The IxRave system enables customer service reps and technicians to remotely diagnose problems with IP-based services, including IPTV, VoIP and high-speed data, and in the process reduces both customer complaint calls and truck rolls, according to Ixia and Bell Canada.

IxRave also enables remote diagnostics without the expense of distributing probes throughout the network, as many IPTV providers do today, and IxRave can be integrated into existing operations and support systems so that the diagnosis is based on customer records reflecting services, service level agreements and other parameters.

“Bell Canada has deployed the system for more than two years,” said Neal Roche, vice president of converged monitoring for Ixia. “BC has used the system to support 2.2 million broadband subscribers and has 3000 customer service representatives and Layer 3 technicians who can access the system. They provide us very clear results in terms of operational savings. IxRave has reduced unnecessary truck rolls by 98%; it has reduced call frequency for the first week of service by 50%.”

One unexpected benefit, Roche said, is that Bell Canada has been able to put back into service 86% of its DSLAM ports that had previously been declared defective because IxRave identified other causes of the problems those ports had had. As a result, Bell Canada’s payback on deployment of IxRave was six months, Roche said.

Ixia has developed a calculator that allows other service provides to enter their own numbers and determine how fast their payback could be, Roche said.

IxRave is a centralized test system that works off of a centrally located high-density Ixia chassis. When a call comes into a customer care center, the service representative can remotely trigger a test path to that specific customer’s residential gateway or set-top box to determine if the services that customer ordered are working, Roche said.

“There needs to be a soft probe at the customer end, but that can be embedded at the residential gateway or downloaded on demand to a PC,” he said. “It allows us then to segment the home network from the copper loop access or the aggregation point or the service delivery network and isolate the fault. It can also be used for ongoing network monitoring or service turn-up and provisioning.”

The system can act like a subscriber and look back into the network or look from the network down to the end-user, Roche said.

“We can emulate the BRAS [broadband remote access system] and go out and collect data, or we can talk to [DSL Forum Standard TR-069] servers if they are deployed,” Roche said. “We are able to layer this on top of whatever copper testing system might already be out there,” or on top of fiber optic testing as well, he said.

IPTV providers in particular are increasingly concerned about the customer quality of experience as they launch their services and try to win market share from cable and satellite providers. “The idea is to prevent customer churn and reputation burn,” Roche said.