Triple-Play Service Deployment

246
Chapter 10: Service Assurance for Triple-Play Services
The operational challenges include the need to:
– Manage the service not just the network.
– Share information and responsibility end to end.
– Accommodate the dynamic nature of IP service delivery.
Operationally, many providers’ organizational structures are
separated into distance groups such as engineering, network
operations, field operations, and provisioning. This organizational
structure may hinder ease of information sharing among groups
which can result in inefficiencies and duplication of effort.With the
new services being delivered over IP, it is indeed challenging to
properly distinguish between content issues, customer premises
issues, and network performance.
QoE is the key differentiator in today’s competitive marketplace.
Providers understand they cannot afford to have quality problems
such as long IPTV channel change times, video pixelization, no dial
tone, dropped VoIP calls, bad call quality, slow data speeds, or any of
the other myriad problems that can result from trouble on multiservice
IP networks. It is apparent that conventional network focused
tools, methods of operations, and operational organizational
structures designed for traditional services are insufficient for
maintaining and understanding true end-to-end QoE for triple-play
service delivery.
Service providers now require end-to-end service assurance
solutions that provide a continuous view of application specific
QoS metrics and that will make it possible to quickly and
efficiently troubleshoot, identify, and resolve any quality
degradation.