As a pioneer of IPTV deployment, SureWest Communications learned the hard way that chronic problems drive up costs for customers. The California-based telco is now working with IneoQuest to more proactively address chronic quality problems.

SureWest now puts IneoQuest Cricket monitors at each point in the network where the video signal is handed off, beginning at the headend. “We monitor at every point in the network,” said James Player, network engineering manager. “We monitor at the headend to make sure the content providers are providing us with the best quality of picture, because if there’s something wrong that, the consumer will see it and assume it’s our fault. Then we monitor in the core of our network and every hop out to the customer.”

At this stage, the cost of probes is too high to monitor in the home, Player said, even though that is where many problems occur. The wide variety in the quality of home wiring has led many IPTV providers, including AT&T and SureWest, to install their own Cat 5 wiring in homes when possible, even if this leads to much longer installation times.

Sometimes, however, installation of new wiring isn’t possible or desired by the homeowner when it can’t be easily hidden, such as in an accessible crawl space or attic, Player said.

“In that situation, we use HPNA (Home Phone Networking Alliance) over the existing wiring,” he said. The problem is that HPNA has to be done over virtually flawless wiring to deliver a good IPTV signal.

When problems become chronic, SureWest will locate an IneoQuest probe in the home to diagnose the problem. “We put a probe out there and see if there is any packet loss or drops, due to the fiber going to the house having low light, for example,” Player said. “We can’t remotely look at it; we have to put a meter on it. The video will drop packets if it is that low. There might be out-of-order packets, because this is IP-based, or they may go through different routes in the network. The set-top box will put it back in order if the packet is in that buffer. But if they are not, then you will have missing frames, which causes tiling.”

Player would like to see the kind of probe capability that is now used independently integrated into set-top boxes and residential gateways to enable customer problems to be more easily diagnosed remotely, so that when customers call in, operators can make a more informed decision about how to handle the problem.

“The last thing we want to do is roll a truck when the problem is power within the home,” he said. “There are some new technologies coming where we can remotely monitor HPNA — we want to integrate that into the residential gateway and the set-top box,” he said. “The HPNA is a Layer 2 bridge network, so it doesn’t get an IP address, and we can’t get to it. When you put [monitoring] into a gateway or a set-top that can access the HPNA network, you can see all kinds of metrics on signal-to-noise ratio.”