All in your head(end)

Software delivers system management security blanket

If you're going to deliver video down your DSL pipe, you really should know whether all the streams are getting through. The best way to do that is to make certain the headend gear, including audio and digital video equipment, is working.

Hutchinson Telephone Company, which runs the headend for Broadband Visions, a 13-member Minnesota-based telco consortium, has worked with its equipment vendor VideoTele.com to develop system management software that should alleviate those potential downtime headaches.

At least the Aveon system management software is making life easier for Hutchinson's ISP manager Kevin Steinhaus.

"We [previously] relied on the customers saying, `Channel whatever is off the air. What's up?'" Steinhaus said. "That's not the way to do it."

The way to do it is to get your vendor to build a management system that monitors that headend equipment.

"We told them what we had to have, and they have been a very good vendor for us and... have worked very closely with us," said Walter Clay, Hutchinson Telephone's CEO and president of Broadband Visions.

Hutchinson's headend pushes converged voice, video and data services via DSL to Broadband Visions' subscribers served by Next Level Communications' customer premises gear.

"What many of us have done is put our voice over one twisted pair and the data and the video over another one, not because of sharing problems but because when somebody goes out and works on something, you don't take the whole system down," Clay said.

The headend, he said, "is typically the thing that will be the spoiler in trying to deliver those kinds of services. I felt the consortium was the best way to go, so I built it and went off and found partners."

Those partners like to bundle services and deliver digital audio and video. It's Hutchinson's responsibility to make sure the headend delivers the digital streams.

"The two main objectives [Hutchinson] had were to assure subscriber satisfaction and compete effectively with digital cable offerings down the street as well as direct broadcast satellite," said Mike Rossman, VideoTele.com's product marketing manager of Aveon Element Management Software.

There was a hitch, though. "They might have 40 to 80 channels to manage with any number of devices and yet the management software was actually focused on a per-element basis, so it didn't scale really well for them and didn't give them the oversight they needed to see the current status at a glance for their entire headend," Rossman said.

Hutchinson wanted a system where "they could just walk by a monitor and see that all was green and healthy and, if not, [have] easy drill-downs to get to the heart of the matter," he added.

Aveon's one-user interface controls multiple MPEG encoders and video and audio pass-throughs.

"It not only gives you visibility of the performance of all these elements in one or more headends but provides for simultaneous control and configuration of multiple channels at once," Rossman said. "This makes the setup of your headend very fast and streamlines the operation, not only for monitoring the performance but for making performance enhancements or changes as the headend grows."

To Steinhaus' probable delight, it even provides remote control headend monitoring.

"With an appropriate password, you can dial into Aveon from anywhere on the Internet," said R. Lee Rainey, VideoTele.com's marketing vice president. Thus, Steinhaus can dial into the residential gateway "and can monitor what's going on evenings, weekends, whenever there's a problem," Rainey added.

Aveon costs $21,900 for a package that allows the operator to monitor 150 streams of video or audio or a combination of both.

It is, said Rainey, part of VideoTele.com's marketplace evolution. "We continue to try to make it as easy as possible for companies to participate in this rapidly growing market for home entertainment services," he said. "Today in the U.S., there are several times more companies operating with this type of equipment from [VideoTele.com] than there are using stuff from all the other vendors combined."