One of the most critical challenges of IPTV cable operators is to provide quality of service to their viewers. Since IPTV uses IP networking mechanism to reach the subscribers, many artifacts of Internet can cause poor Quality of Experience (QoE) to viewers, which leads decreased customer satisfaction and increased customer complains through call centers. It is very essential for IPTV operators to resolve QoE issues, in order to increase customer satisfaction and be able to maintain customers for long run.
A recent study shows that QoE accounts for more than 25% of IPTV adaptation obstacles. The other obstacles include, high subscriber fee - equipment (19%), lack of completing programs (15%), satisfied with existing programs (12%), compelling offers from competitions (11%), high subscriber fee - content (11%), poor customer service and support (6%), others (2%).
One of the most common culprit of poor QoE is packet loss, a normal occurrence in any IP network. packet loss happens for many reasons in variety of different locations. There is no way for an IPTV operator to protect the network against all possible causes and different location of packet losses. many packet losses occur in last mile which makes it even more difficult for IPTV operator to detect and address the problem. The following outlines some of common reasons for packet loss:
One of the simplest, most effective, and least expensive way of correcting packet loss issue is to deploy a layer of software that detects and corrects the packet losses on the fly from the video stream that is being received by customer. The software recovers the packet losses using an algorithm that generates the missing packets and sends them along with the original video content to customer set-top-box which in turn repairs the video before showing it on the customer's monitor.
The followings outlines some of the benefits this software solution that can bring to IPTV operators:
bruce atlasi is a professional computer engineer, skilled in telecomm and datacomm technologies and architecture. He has diverse working experience with many telecomm start-ups and fortune 100 companies, including Cisco Systems, IBM, and Siemens. He regularly blogs on About Hi-Tech site.
A recent study shows that QoE accounts for more than 25% of IPTV adaptation obstacles. The other obstacles include, high subscriber fee - equipment (19%), lack of completing programs (15%), satisfied with existing programs (12%), compelling offers from competitions (11%), high subscriber fee - content (11%), poor customer service and support (6%), others (2%).
One of the most common culprit of poor QoE is packet loss, a normal occurrence in any IP network. packet loss happens for many reasons in variety of different locations. There is no way for an IPTV operator to protect the network against all possible causes and different location of packet losses. many packet losses occur in last mile which makes it even more difficult for IPTV operator to detect and address the problem. The following outlines some of common reasons for packet loss:
- Environmental effect, such as home appliances and electrical public transportation systems
- Congestion which normally happens on prime time viewing time
- Bad wiring at customers premises
- Heterogeneous network equipment
- Out of sequence packets
- Duplicate packets
- Core network issues, such as lost network links and route convergence
- Mismatch TSID to service group configuration
- RF interference on specific frequency/QAM channels
- Reed-Solomon error correction efficiency
- Over-subscription/blocking of SDV QAM channels
- Mini-carousel distribution and configuration
- Grooming/muxing issues at the edge QAM device
One of the simplest, most effective, and least expensive way of correcting packet loss issue is to deploy a layer of software that detects and corrects the packet losses on the fly from the video stream that is being received by customer. The software recovers the packet losses using an algorithm that generates the missing packets and sends them along with the original video content to customer set-top-box which in turn repairs the video before showing it on the customer's monitor.
The followings outlines some of the benefits this software solution that can bring to IPTV operators:
- Scalability - once installed on the headend, it supports an unlimited number of set-top-boxes
- Fixes all loss types, regardless of single or multiple events or where it comes from
- Configurable network overhead, with granularity of one packet
- Configurable latency
bruce atlasi is a professional computer engineer, skilled in telecomm and datacomm technologies and architecture. He has diverse working experience with many telecomm start-ups and fortune 100 companies, including Cisco Systems, IBM, and Siemens. He regularly blogs on About Hi-Tech site.
No comments:
Post a Comment