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IPTV: Telchemy Monitors Video PerformanceBY JOHANNE TORRES
TMCnet VoIP Minute Watch Columnist
Telchemy Incorporated of Suwanee, GA, a voice and video over IP monitoring company, just integrated IPTV performance measurement technology into the VQmon/SA-VM video analysis software product, the company announced today. The VQmon/SA-VM is embedded into set-top boxes, head-end systems, probes, analyzers and routers to monitor video over IP.
The VQmon/SA-VM software agent monitors IP based video streams in real-time; measures the time distribution of lost and discarded packets using a multi-state statistical model; examines the type of video codec, bit rate and other factors; and uses a perceptual model to calculate a video transmission quality factor and an estimated VQS (MOS) opinion score. VQmon/SA-VM supports H.261, H.263, H.263+, H.264, MPEG1, MPEG2, MJPEG, MPEG4 and VC1 codecs over RTP/UDP and MPEG2 Transport/UDP protocols. "Telchemy's VQmon technology has been licensed by over 26 network and test equipment vendors and is integrated into more than 50 different product lines, ranging from IP phones and residential gateways to trunking gateways, routers, probes and analyzers," said Alan Clark, Telchemy's CEO and president. "We welcome the opportunity to help IPTV service providers to deliver high-quality, reliable service to their customers and achieve rapid market success."
The system is also able to monitor large numbers of video streams in real time, with a capacity of over 100,000 packets per second when implemented in software on a typical server platform and over 1 million packets per second when implemented in network processors or silicon. "This allows test equipment vendors to build probes and analyzers that can monitor high-speed aggregate video streams, or set-top box manufacturers to add video performance monitoring into existing products with no additional hardware cost," noted the company's news release.
Telchemy's VQmon technology could be a good option for system administrators wanting to detect, monitor and resolve call quality and network related problems for networked multi-media services, including voice and video over IP and to support active QoS control applications such as call admission control. According to Telchemy's news release, "VQmon/SA-VM is the first Video Performance Management software to consider the impact of time varying and transient packet impairments on perceptual quality, and to model content dependency within video streams."
Prominence Networks just announced last month that it integrated Telchemy's VQmon/SA active VoIP performance monitoring technology into its MediaIP Service Delivery products. Through a new reselling agreement, VQmon/SA will help Prominence "enhance their existing MediaIP products, which already guarantees QoS for end-to-end service delivery of real-time voice and video applications," noted the companies' news announcement. Prominence said that specifically, "it will help add the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) capability in the company's MediaIP product suite."
When Acterna, a business broadband communications testing provider, thought of expanding its VoIP performance testing offering, it also chose Telchemy. Acterna decided to license the VQmon/SA VoIP analysis and call quality monitoring technology system.
Here is what Telchemy’s president & CEO, Alan Clark, said to TMCnet about the company’s relationship with Acterna back in June: "Acterna previously used VQmon in the HST3000 handheld tester and became a customer in June 2003. We believe that they decided to extend their use of VQmon to other products as they had good experiences with both Telchemy's VQmon technology and with Telchemy as a business partner."
Telchemy Incorporated
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Johanne Torres is contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more articles by Johanne Torres, please visit:
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