June 5, 2006 Chicago, IL -- Agilent Technologies Inc. says that network equipment manufacturers and service providers can now use its N2X multiservices test platform to characterize the ability of individual network elements or entire networks to meet IPTV quality-of-experience (QoE) expectations prior to deployment.
The Agilent N2X combines channel changing (zapping), hundreds of IPTV channels, and hundreds of thousands of VoIP and data-traffic streams to identify the true service quality experienced by every IPTV subscriber.
Dynamic subscriber behaviors, such as IPTV channel zapping, combined with a mix of triple-play traffic severely stress access-network equipment, which can compromise video quality. Network equipment manufacturers and service providers must ensure IPTV quality expectations can be met for every subscriber under realistic and highly scaled network conditions. Today, this testing is performed with many thousands of set-top boxes and hundreds of video sources, which is complex, expensive, labor-intensive and time-consuming, and offers only partial test coverage.
The N2X IPTV QoE test offering addresses these issues and characterizes the service-quality aspects on a per-subscriber basis. Each N2X port can emulate thousands of IPTV subscribers with simulated dynamic behaviors, as well as generate and receive highly scalable combinations of video, data, and voice traffic. The N2X can test the scalability limits of each network device, as defined by RFC 4445, by measuring Media Delivery Index (MDI) delay factor and loss metrics on a per-subscriber basis.
The Agilent N2X multiservice test set is available now at a starting price of $20,000.