Home >  Articles > Quality of experience for broadband - IPTV consumers

•  
•  
•  
•  

Sponsored and supplied by Compuware

Due to the increasing technical complexities facing Telco/ISPs today, it's fairly safe to say that any Telco/ISP that does not practice some form of Total Quality Management (TQM [1]) principles will struggle to maintain profitability.

Complex communication services like IPTV and VoD (Video on Demand) require sophisticated monitoring and troubleshooting tools along with skilled helpdesk and support staff to maintain a level of quality that is acceptable to customers.

Telco/ISPs that make the wrong choices in this area will find their helpdesk and support costs rapidly escalating at the same time as their customers churn to other providers due to poor customer service.

For any Telco/ISP, this blend of increasing costs and falling revenue is a sure recipe for disaster. Vantage Service Check (VSC) can assist Telco/ISPs in providing profitable IPTV/VoD services.

The world of IPTV and TQM

Before we start, we need to understand how Internet television and Video on Demand (VoD) relate to IPTV as there are some subtle differences here.

IPTV has been defined as "generally funded and supported by large telecom providers who have undertaken the mission of creating a competitive replacement product for digital cable and satellite services."[2] This means that the Telco/ISP will control and deliver on all elements of the IPTV service including the home broadband connection and the IPTV Set Top Box (STB). The most popular IPTV control and delivery system in use today is Microsoft IPTV.

Internet Television is defined differently from IPTV as "an open evolving framework in which a very large number of small and medium-sized video producers contribute highly innovative niche content alongside with offerings from more traditional retail and distribution channels"[2].

The Internet is used to distribute the content and a key differentiator for Internet television is it provides the content publisher with a direct communication channel to the consumer.

Video on Demand (VoD) is really a subset of IPTV and Internet television. It uses the same fundamental technologies like MPEG video compression standards and RTP /RTSP (Real Time/Real Time Streaming) protocols for distribution but currently lacks the service "packaging" and control elements that IPTV and Internet television will provide.

Vantage Service Check for IPTV

So let's assume hypothetically that you are the managing director of a fictitious Australian Telco/ISP called "TeleVisp" that has a technical solution that will delver IPTV and VoD services that works as your customers would expect. (E.g. Japanese TQM "atarimae hinshitsu" principal [1]).

To keep customers paying for "TeleVisp's" IPTV service, it must also be equivalent to that currently delivered by competing IPTV, Cable, Satellite or Free-to Air services and they will need to maintain that level of service.

Therefore, to enable "TeleVisp" to stay in business in the long term, they need to:

1. Measure their individual customer's quality of experience.(QoE) when using IPTV.

2. Use this information to form plans and setup processes to focus on maintaining your service levels and to improve on them in the future. This process is called Continuous Process Improvement. (e.g. the Japanese TQM "Kaizen" principle [1] )

How can Service Check help here? When a customer has a problem and rings the "TeleVisp" helpdesk, ServiceCheck can:

1. Display chronological evidence of an individual customer's IPTV/VoD performance.

2. Show service problems leading up to the time that the customer called helpdesk.

3. Confirm which parts of "TeleVisp's" Core/IPTV infrastructure are working properly and which parts are contributing to the problem experienced.

4. Via real-time deep packet inspection, summarize all customer IP traffic to determine if customer activity like file downloads, peer to peer downloads, Malware or VoIP etc is contributing to the current IPTV/VoD problem.

This will enable "TeleVisp" to measure how all their individual customers are experiencing their IPTV service on a 24 hour by 7 day basis.

The benefits gained by "TeleVisp" in doing this are:

1. Rapid customer problem analysis and resolution, resulting in shorter helpdesk call times and happier customers.

2. Helpdesk/support teams can repair the problem the first time resulting in significant reduction in unnecessary escalations of customer problems and potential personnel/equipment dispatches. This will lower the "TeleVisp" support costs.

3. Happy customers do not transfer or "churn" to other providers.

Figure 1. Detailed view of IPTV performance.

Vantage Service Check also has a Subscriber Intelligence (SI) IPTV module that will enable "TeleVisp" to use the information collected by the ServiceCheck and NDA modules for planning and Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) activities.

The SI module will also provide "TeleVisp" with the customer marketing information that will allow it to develop its own flavour of new and existing IPTV services to enhance their brand and provide great service to their current and future customers. (E.g. the Japanese TQM "miryokuteki hinshitsu" principle [1]).

"TeleVisp" will be able to charge more for advertising content by offering behavioural advertising to IPTV/VoD subscribers - NOTE: ServiceCheck monitors on-line activity and therefore "knows" what's of interest to a household.

Figure 2. IPTV Subscriber Intelligence report.

It interesting to note that most of today's ISPs do NOT measure their individual customer's quality of experience for their existing VoIP and data services We believe this is the case because most Telco/ISPs think it is an impossible task to measure all of their individual customers QoE, all of the time.

Therefore, they subconsciously think it an uninteresting task and therefore not worth doing whereas TQM principles would say to such Telco/ISPs that such measurements are critical to their business survival.

For example, "TeleVisp's" act of measuring their customers QoE will likely lay the groundwork for improving ISP revenues. "TeleVisp" will be able to ensure that by understanding how their customers are using their IPTV service and the problems they may experience, it will lead to improvements and enhancements of the "TeleVisp" IPTV service (e.g. the Japanese TQM "Kansei" principle [1])

Technical challenges still exist for the successful deployment of an IPTV service in Australia when using Internet based xDSL services. A major hurdle is the lack of Quality of Service (QoS) on most Australian (and the rest of the world) broadband "last mile" connections. (For example between your home and the ISP/Telco network.)

QoS implemented on a network allows the Telco/ISP network devices to prioritise IPTV (and VoIP traffic etc) for example, over data traffic so any large downloads etc will not affect the IPTV video or voice quality. It is anticipated that this will be "fixed" in the short term by the Telco/ISP providing a bundled service where they own the "last mile" along with the VoIP and IPTV service which will allow them to implement QoS in the service as a whole.

Another hurdle is the lack of bandwidth available to the average broadband user necessary for IPTV, VoIP and data services to coexist on the same broadband connection.

If we exclude High Definition TV (HDTV) for the moment, most broadcast-quality digital TV services are delivered using MPEG-2 (a compression standard for video and voice) with an average bandwidth requirement of 2 Mb/s per channel viewed.

A quick calculation will show that if we assume that we should deliver at least two simultaneous IPTV channels to the home, (one for viewing and one for recording) then at least 4 Mbps is required for just for IPTV using MPEG-2 compression.

One solution is to use one of the Fiber To The Node (FTTN) technologies to deliver higher bandwidths to the home. Another solution is to reduce the required video bandwidth by using newer MPEG-4 compression algorithms (currently subject to ratification).

These new compression algorithms can allow two video streams to use approximately 1.5Mb/s which would fit well in to the standard 1500/256Kbps ADSL connection that is available to most Australian metro users today. If you then provide sophisticated IPTV channel select and control mechanisms (like Microsoft IPTV does for instance) then it is possible to use these bandwidths to deliver the selected TV channels to the customer.

Regardless of mechanism used to delver IPTV, Vantage Service Check can provide a solution to enable 24/7 measuring, monitoring and trouble shooting of subscriber QoE for IPTV services including VoIP, mobile and data services.

Conclusion

The "one-liner" takeaway for this series of articles on Vantage Server Check could be "You can't measure, manage or fix or what you can not see"!

For successful broadband service delivery you need as much visibility of your customer's broadband experience as you can get. Vantage Service Check helps you gain this visibility and enables you to provide cost effective customer service to assist in creating profitable IPTV and VoIP services.

References
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/
[2] http://www.masternewmedia.org

• Share this Article:
• digg this
• add to del.icio.us
• StumbleUpon
• RSS Feeds