Lessons learned from a growing IPTV network

What it takes to make an IPTV service profitable

IPTV places extreme demands on both your network and your staff, while the revenue per customer is comparatively low. In this article Ola Friis, CTO at Zitius, describes the technological challenges of operating and developing an IPTV network that is continuously being expanded.

– The challenge is to prevent operating costs from getting out of hand as the customer base grows; to succeed at this is vital to profitability, says Ola Friis. In our experience, a successful IPTV venture requires a large-scale mass market as well as efficient tools for network monitoring and troubleshooting.

Zitius Service Delivery AB is one of Sweden’s leading data communication operators. They have been active in the market since 2003 and started delivering IPTV three years ago. Over these years, Zitius has been facing a variety of technological challenges, all the while expanding their network as well as their customer base.

– A stumbling block for a start-up Internet operator is that even if you have few customers initially, you need to prepare both your network and your organization for IPTV, which is a major task, says Ola Friis.

New user behavior patterns make a difference

To deliver a traditional Internet service, just about any network equipment will fit the bill. With IPTV, on the other hand, switches and routers are subjected to a far heavier traffic load.

– The first few customers typically don’t demand that much of their equipment. The problems usually appear when customers start signing up in greater numbers. It is also frequently much harder to do fault-tracing for IPTV than for an ordinary Internet service, because IPTV is a more complex technology.

Ola Friis says Zitius has noticed very clearly how new patterns of user behavior affect their networks much more profoundly than in the past. While the number of TV subscribers is steadily growing, there is also a noticeable increase in traffic volume for other means of digital distribution. A while back, Zitius saw their traffic load peak suddenly in an unprecedented manner. The reason for this proved to be the release of a new and very popular PC game for download.

– Such events have a powerful impact on network operators like ourselves, but they are also essentially beyond our control. Functions for traffic prioritization are of course important in the network, but even using such techniques, we may find our IPTV quality compromised by unforeseen events. So it’s not enough just to perform an isolated measurement and rely on those results indefinitely; a network operator needs to have systems that continuously monitor what is going on in the network.

A bid to boost customer satisfaction

In the spring of 2010, Zitius introduced the Netrounds testing and monitoring system from Absilion for monitoring and efficient fault-tracing of IPTV.

– We used to have one or two measurement probes for ad-hoc troubleshooting, but after such sessions we still felt we had a hard time determining whether any of the problems had arisen in our own network, and if so, where. Complex issues took far too long to solve. Long-term, it was not a tenable situation.

Before selecting a supplier, Zitius evaluated various solutions available on the market.

– We chose Netrounds because the system meets our requirements and because it’s miles ahead of the competition in terms of value for money. What we especially like is the simplicity of the product. Since Netrounds is offered as a service, including support and upgrades, we are relieved of server and database maintenance, version handling, and so forth. As Absilion takes care of this for us, we can focus on our customers and our core business. Furthermore, Absilion has a good understanding of our market and an appreciation of our ideas and needs – and they often convert these insights into new features in their product.

Efficient ways of working

Zitius uses Netrounds in order to secure high quality of their IPTV delivery, and the staff consult the system on a daily basis to obtain an overview of the network status and service performance. The company has been able to redirect its ways of working towards preventive efforts, thanks to its improved knowledge of how the traffic is impacted over time.

– In case of faults of a localized nature we use one of the portable Netrounds probes to get at the roots of the problem, which quite frequently resides in the end customer’s equipment.

The challenge is to prevent operating costs from getting out of hand as the customer base grows; to succeed at this is vital to profitability. The alternative is to hire more staff, which however is an inferior solution that does nothing to keep the operation costefficient.

Some time ago, before having deployed Netrounds, Zitius was plagued by a serious issue that took nearly two months to sort out because of the difficulty of identifying and pinning down the fault.

– Not infrequently when such an elusive problem arises, you get a fair share of unproductive mudslinging among the parties involved in the investigation. Recently we had a similar incident which we were able to solve within a couple of days, communicating in a positive spirit with everyone else involved. Netrounds was crucial to reaching this quick solution.

Direct feedback is necessary

Starting out as a fairly immature and untested technology a few years back, today’s IPTV solutions are now becoming increasingly stable and reliable. Ola Friis describes how Zitius is constantly searching for new methods of ensuring a good service delivery, the goal being perfect quality all the way to the end customer.

– Attaining this goal requires comprehensive supervision of the network: we must be able to track second by second what is happening. We require constant and immediate feedback to know if the steps we take – anything from upgrading our switches to installing new UPSes – have the desired impact. In this work of ours, Netrounds is a very important tool which we are extremely satisfied with, Ola Friis concludes.

Zitius opted to place powerful Genalyzer G1000 measurement probes in central locations in their various metro networks. To facilitate precise locating of faults, Zitius chose to also deploy smaller portable measurement probes (Genalyzer G100) at strategic points in their access networks or in their customers’ networks.

Quick facts about Zitius

• Established 2003
• Annual growth rate over 50%
• Agreements with more than 20 service providers
• Client list includes 7 out of Sweden’s 10 largest real estate companies
• Active in more than 10 locations
• Over 100 000 households connected via fiber networks
• Over 10 000 households connected via DSL