The Business Challenge
Market demand is driving Broadcasters and TV Network Operators to deliver interactive TV services to acquire and retain consumers. Consumers want their services available on multiple devices, with the ability to access time–shifted and on–demand content supported by rich programme information, search, recommendation, gaming and gambling applications. Operators are simultaneously seeking greater revenue through triple–play service bundles and operational economies by delivering multimedia services over a single IP infrastructure.
The Technical Challenge
Delivering a good interactive TV service over IP is not easy, and consumers have very high expectations of TV reliability. Mixing TV with other services only increases the challenge. Operators need to:
• Manage multiple conflicting services over a converged IP network, which the TV service provider may not own
• Assure the performance of the transport network, particularly the ‘last mile’
• Manage increasingly complex consumer devices
• Manage the complex service delivery infrastructure in the core
To improve and assure services, the operator needs to be able to measure them.
The historical approach of measuring equipment alarms did work in single service networks with relatively dumb consumer devices. However, this approach is insufficient for TV over IP.
It is insufficient to only monitor individual network equipment alarms or equipment underperformance against theoretical thresholds. Modern network redundancy and error correction can protect consumers from seeing an adverse impact from some of these problems. Equally, network equipment cannot consistently identify timing issues, signalling issues, routing issues or conflicts between modern services, which do impact consumers. Even more significant are problems with the ‘last mile’ of the network, the consumer device or end–to–end applications. Traditionally these are, at best, randomly tested. Testing does not give a view of ongoing customer service delivery. The network operator needs to see what the consumer sees!
Probes and Robots
Most operators have tried the stop–gap approach of deploying Probes into the distribution network and Robots at the network edge, or even in customer homes, to supplement their network equipment alarms. While the cost of Probes can be justified for deep stream analysis at the head–end or traffic analysis in the network core, the cost of deploying and managing dedicated monitoring hardware near the network edge is prohibitively expensive. Beyond the initial cost of purchasing Probes, they need to be deployed, housed, powered, managed and maintained. The TCO (total cost of ownership) for network probes makes them impractical for widespread deployment.
The New Approach
Complex modern services need to be measured on the closest device to the consumer, the set–top box. Set–top box telemetry can reflect the set–top box device performance, the ‘last mile’ delivery and the true customer experience of the end–to–end service. This is the new approach to service monitoring, providing more relevant information and true customer impact analysis. This approach also avoids the need to deploy or manage any new devices.
The challenge is to meet the requirements for set–top box monitoring and to make the monitoring of these large device populations a reality.
Set–top box Monitoring Requirements
Any set–top box monitoring system must meet the following requirements:
• do not disturb the end user device function or performance
• do not generate high volumes of traffic that might disturb the network
• be portable across a wide range of end user devices
• be scalable to large populations (millions) of live end user devices
• be extensible and flexible, to meet the network operator’s evolving needs
• do not compromise device security: no scope for 3rd party control
• provide data security: support encryption and authentication
• be extensible and flexible, to meet the network operator’s evolving needs
• accommodate NAT and Firewalls in consumer homes
MiriMON® satisfies these requirements.
Standards
The Broadband Forum is currently in the process of standardising the area of consumer device monitoring, through TR–126 and TR–135. Mirifice is a member of the Broadband Forum and MiriMON is aligned with these emerging standards.
The earlier TR–069 standard was developed by the Broadband Forum for consumer device provisioning and configuration. MiriMON is not a device configuration system and does not compete with TR–069 based ACS (auto–configuration server) systems. MiriMON and TR–069 based ACS systems are complimentary, as device configuration and device monitoring are both essential capabilities for a modern service provider.
Please contact info@mirifice.com for a Whitepaper that discusses the benefits for operators of using the MiriMON monitoring solution as an extension to TR–069.
MiriMON for Monitoring and Customer Experience Management (CEM)
MiriMON provides a real–time view of the Quality of Experience delivered to each and every consumer, enabling:
• Proactive and efficient Customer Care
• Effective Device (set–top box) Management
• Enhanced information for Network Management
• True impact analysis for Faults
• Visibility of the network ‘last mile’
• Real Business Intelligence and Consumer Insight
Our MiriMON system can be also applied to help Mobile Operators and Broadband ISPs manage the Customer Experience they deliver.