Symmetricom Announces IPTV Probe for Monitoring Triple Play Service Quality of Experience (QoE) and Quality of Service (QoS): Q-400 IPTV Probe D

SAN JOSE, Calif. (BusinessWire EON) June 18, 2007 --     "For IPTV, three closely related factors are essential: the quality of video itself, its error-free delivery over a network, and the quality of experience encountered by the consumer," said Steven Hawley, Senior IPTV Analyst for Multimedia Research Group Inc, a leading market analysis company. "Operators that perform rigorous test and measurement, to objective benchmarks -- for both live and on-demand content -- have the greatest likelihood to capture new subscribers and keep them loyal."

The new Q-400 monitors up to 400 SD or HD H264 IPTV streams and up to 10,000 VoIP streams in parallel in full passive mode. Scoring of streams is presented with the familiar Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for VoIP (ITU G107 Model) and for IPTV in the V-Factor MOS score, similar to the MPQM Model. The new IPTV probe will be demonstrated at NXTcomm 07, June 18-21, 2007 in Chicago, Illinois, Booth #1156.



"Symmetricom has been in the triple play services assurance business for nearly eight years and the first to measure performance for any streaming media including HDTV/SDTV, IPTV, VoD and VoIP," commented Yves Cognet, chief technology officer for Symmetricom's QoE Assurance Division. "Symmetricom's latest IPTV probe works end-to-end, enabling rapid identification of symptoms affecting network health in the core network all the way to a customer's premise equipment (CPE), providing QoE to assure the customer experience as well as traditional QoS to assure core network performance. The Q-400 gives carriers and service providers the measurement tools they need to improve revenues and profits by increasing customer satisfaction while lowering technical support costs."

Symmetricom's triple play ready network probes enable passive and active monitoring for video, voice and data applications for quality assurance over IP, and are core components of Symmetricom's QoE solutions to monitor and diagnose quality impairments. Symmetricom's QoE solutions provide a reliable benchmark (MOS score) that enables CSPs to monitor and diagnose VoIP, as well as the perceptual impact of video quality impairments that may be introduced by either transmission over an IP network or from artifacts introduced by various encoding methodologies. Symmetricom's high performance network probes collect and report aggregate statistics in real time for customer flow simulations and traffic flow analysis.

Monitoring IPTV streams and VoIP streams in parallel in full passive mode, the triple play ready Q-400 offers the following features:

-- Scores up to 400 IPTV streams simultaneously (V-Factor MOS score) and up to 10,000 VoIP streams (ITU G107 MOS score) or a mix

-- Supports active IGMP Join/Leave for active channel monitoring and monitoring of channel leave/join time (zap)

-- Supports unicast as well as multicast in full passive mode

-- Supports HD as well as SD

-- Supports MPEG2TS for any MPEG2 or H264 IPTV stream, and AUDIO and VIDEO scoring

Symmetricom network probes support all relevant Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards for Internet Protocol (IP) performance metrics and the internationally accepted ITU Y.1541 specifications as well as ETSI TR 101290. They also support IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, as well as unicast or multicast-based RTP/RTCP applications such as VoIP and SIP based applications such as ToIP. They are fully compatible with Symmetricom's centralized management and reporting NOC software and software agents and run the entire library of Symmetricom software, including V-Factor for optimum video/audio performance. V-Factor measures QoE from a customer's point of view and is based on the Moving Pictures Quality Metrics (MPQM) model adapted specifically for end-to-end video quality scoring. It is the first and only video quality metric that takes into account both network and content impairments.

"We've implemented the Q-400 in HP's Grenoble IPTV Solution Center as part of our comprehensive OSS for IPTV offering," commented Norman Kincl, Solutions Manager, Communications, Media and Entertainment, HP. "Our customers need carrier-class, end-to-end visibility into network performance, and the Symmetricom IPTV probe helps us measure the delivered video quality. Its improved flexibility, capacity and scalability enable us to deliver enhanced quality of experience with quality of service, and ultimately, real business value for our customers."

Symmetricom network probes can be equipped with a GPS or a TXCO oscillator that provides the excellent synchronization required for accurate measurements of key metrics such as IP Performance metrics, as defined in RFC 2330, ITU-T 1540 and ITU-T 1451 as well as ETSI TR101290.

Availability

The Q-400 IPTV Probe will be shipping in June 2007. A high performance 2U IPTV probe and Gigabit Ethernet UTP management port ready, it is configurable to measure performance from 100-400 H264 SDTV or 100 HDTV channels, or a mix of both. Pricing is available for various configurations.

For more information, visit: http://qoe.symmetricom.com/lp/Q-400/.

About Symmetricom, Inc.

As a worldwide leader in precise time and frequency products and services, Symmetricom provides "Perfect Timing" to customers around the world. Since 1985, the company's solutions have helped define the world's time and frequency standards, delivering precision, reliability and efficiency to wireline and wireless networks, instrumentation and testing applications and network time management. Deployed in more than 90 countries, the company's synchronization solutions include primary reference sources, building integrated timing supplies (BITS), GPS timing receivers, time and frequency distribution systems, network time servers and ruggedized oscillators. Symmetricom also incorporates technologies including Universal Timing Interface (UTI), Network Time Protocol (NTP), Precision Time Protocol (IEEE 1588), and others supporting the world's migration to Next Generation Networks (NGN). Symmetricom is based in San Jose, Calif., with offices worldwide. For more information, visit www.symmetricom.com.