Spirent Communications selected as exclusive test system provider for Cisco IPTV infrastructure

The European Advanced Networking Test Center AG (EANTC) has selected Spirent Communications’ testing solutions to analyze Cisco Systems’ IPTV infrastructure in a test commissioned by Light Reading. Spirent’s global services team collaborated with EANTC to conduct an independent test of Cisco’s IPTV infrastructure to verify an end-to-end IPTV and triple-play solution focusing on the network service requirements of broadcast TV and video-on-demand (VOD) applications.

For this event, Spirent supplied its TestCenter, Video Quality Test System and GEM Ethernet Network and Impairment Emulator. In addition to test equipment, Spirent provided a three-person engineering support team for the pre-staging and the two-week period of formal testing. Spirent’s professional services team collaborated with EANTC to create the test scripts. With engineering support and equipment, Spirent offered load generators for emulation of 120 DSLAMs plus 65 service ports (GigE and 10GigE), performed video quality measurements and conducted impairment generation for the duration of the test.

Covering four main areas that included quality of service (QoS), massive scalability of broadcast services, high availability of all services and user experience during high network load conditions, this test exposed the realities of IPTV service deployment and the need for thorough testing before the service goes live. Spirent’s test systems enabled EANTC to analyze QoS from the perspective of the user, often referred to as quality of experience (QoE), and the handling of preferential services by the network including network resource allocation in the case of limited resources. With TestCenter, the companies were able to identify small sub-parts-per-million loss in all the data, and to analyze the associated flows in detail, identifying the less than 0.00002 percent packet loss in IPTV multicast service.

For more information, visit www.spirent.com.