Measuring IPTV QOS (Quality Of Service)

IPTV QOS is a topic that has become a confusing issue for many businesses, so let’s clear it up.

Quality Of Service, being something new oftens makes people automatically think of using pre-existing measurement techniques. This basic starting point for QOS measurement is where most of the confusion is generated.

In the same way that when companies began moving from Analogue to digital broadcast signals, the natural tendancy of the existing engineers was to want to measure the new digital signal by converting it back to analogue and then using their existing equipment. IPTV QOS has caused a lot of the same methodology, whereby engineers with a network background want to measure network statistics, and engineers with a video background want to measure video statistics. The former (network engineers) can happily take their measurements from the existing network infrastructure, but get no feeling for what packets on the network relate to what video signals. The video people want to convert the IPTV signal back into its digital video format (converting it from IP to Video), which really misses the point that all you’re really finding out is how well the...