Agilent Technologies has announced a new software option for its handheld Ethernet performance tester, FrameScope Pro. The new option simplifies the deployment and troubleshooting of IPTV services and enables service quality tests at the residential gateway, the company said.

Validating network integrity and transport quality of service are critical to ensuring a high quality of experience to new video-service subscribers. Technicians of telecom service providers who deploy Ethernet-based video need appropriate tools to analyse the network and service conditions at a residential gateway.

Visual and aural inspections of the delivered content are less reliable methods to detect marginal network conditions; analysis of the transport stream and service transactions can reveal undesired network behaviour before artefacts and drop-outs become visible and audible.

With the new option for FrameScope Pro, service technicians can connect to the residential gateway and acquire statistics of MPEG-2 transport stream issues such as loss of synchronisation and continuity and transport errors. Measuring the Media Delivery Index (MDI) and analysing service transactions like channel changes provide metrics that closely relate to the subscriber’s quality of experience.

A customisable, three-stage scoring scheme allows service groups to implement commonly agreed acceptance levels for all relevant quality metrics; marginal or unacceptable parameters are highlighted automatically. FrameScope Pro supports both IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) and RTSP (Real-time Streaming Protocol) to control the IPTV channel setup.

Transport quality metrics derived from the sequence and timestamp information in the RTP header include packet count, packet loss ratio and packet jitter. MPEG-2 transport streams carrying MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 multicast video are measured for ETSI TR 101 290 parameters and Media Delivery Index, as defined by RFC 4445.

Agilent

1800 629 485

www.agilent.com.au

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