Triple-Play Service Deployment

Chapter 10: Service Assurance for Triple-Play Services
For successful market entry, providers must deliver reliable service
that spans the entire network from headend to customer. To
accomplish this, solutions are needed that give the provider true,
end-to-end customer QoE service visibility. Visibility into network
performance at varying levels of bandwidth consumption will be
important. With limited predictability in dynamic network
performance, the provider must break down traditional organizational
boundaries, share information, and manage service
delivery end to end. An effective, comprehensive service assurance
system must be in place to prevent potential service quality issues.
With customer acquisition costs ranging up to thousands of
dollars per user, the impact of the loss of a single subscriber is
significant.
An effectively planned and implemented service assurance
strategy will address this and more. It will enable the provider to
decrease costs and complexity and ultimately increase revenue.
Satisfied customers will remain loyal and are likely to add new
services as they become available.
Technical and Operational Challenges to Triple Play
Providers rolling out triple play are rapidly discovering a significant
number of challenges—both technical and operational—that must
be overcome to successfully deliver voice, video, and data services.
The technical challenges include the reality that:
– Voice, video, and high speed data place different burdens on
the network delivering the service.
– The traditional network—core, access, and home—is not
optimized for these new services.
– New service deliveries usually involve complex IP-protocol
interactions among home, access, network, and source elements.
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