Enhancing TV Service Quality with Elecard's Boro: A CTI Success Story

CUSTOMER'S TASK

Monitoring the availability and video freezing of IPTV channels received from a cable television headend in Wisconsin and the unencrypted local TV over the air in several cable DMAs. The ability to receive immediate notification of the service quality degradation was another feature CTI was looking for.

REQUIREMENTS

• Possibility to deploy probes in multiple physical locations, including subscribers’ homes;
• Cost-effective system for monitoring IPTV signals;
• Email notifications on the issues affecting the service.

SOLUTION

Integration of Boro software into the IPTV system for monitoring video streaming services with email alerts.

RESULT

• Engineers were able to immediately identify and correct issues with some of the over the air antennas;
• Improved the TV Outage reporting ensured the end viewers' were informed of individual channel outages before they needed to contact the help desk team;
• Dramatically reduced the time to detect problems in the service, thus improving the end viewers' TV experience;
• The same license pool was utilized for monitoring channels in data centers or subscribers' homes without requiring any extra purchases.

SOLUTION IMPLEMENTATION

Boro probes are installed across the network and alerting profiles are configured for monitoring multicast streams. Each dashboard in the set provided by Boro is easy enough to read. The “LiveView” dashboard is added to some large televisions in the Network Operations Center. Additional probes are going to be deployed to provide a more complete overview of the service. 

The Windows platform is used to install the primary probe. There is a possibility to opt for a Linux-based server to install the probe in the future which might be even easier to configure.

Feedback

"We were able to integrate monitoring and email alerting within just a few days though we faced the NIC/IP route priority when multi-homing a Boro probe.
Our Boro representatives are always very friendly and able to quickly and accurately answer our questions.  They helped us quickly tune the product to our preferences.  We would gladly procure other relevant products from Elecard!"

Aaron K. Bialas​, Regional Network Manager CTI