IPTV middleware supplier Orca Interactive this week said that it would work with Swedish firm Operax to push its Quality of Service resource controllers to its client base.
For most tier 1 IPTV applications we would have thought that customers would have arranged their own QoS services when they built or extended their network. Operax in fact got off the ground in 2003 when it licensed France Telecom’s R&D department to use its Operax IQ-Man product.
The whole idea behind Quality of Service is to have awareness of the capacity of a network at every point, usually on a server based application, which can then work with routers in a network to sense traffic levels and prioritize packet types, so that real time activities such as voice and live streaming video can be kept real time. They often work alongside acceleration technology such as MPLS and VPLS and many modern wireless networks have 30 plus layers of QoS built into them these days.
What we think is happening here is that some of the Orca tier 2 and 3 telco clients are now beginning to scale the numbers of people using IPTV within their networks and this is beginning to mean that they running out of capacity. Orca has simply gone out and found a reasonable solution and is now marketing it directly to existing clients.
Operax calls what it does dynamic Resource and Admission Control allowing end-to-end QoS for any IP session. It will also mean that as Orca clients roll out more applications the real time network traffic can be distinguished from applications that don’t require real time support.
Operax Solutions Alliances Director, Roberto Kauffmann-Dev, said: “We see that with subscriber numbers going up and an increasing shift to on-demand content, most IPTV operators need a solution for QoS Control.’
Back in September Operax signed a deal to integrate the Seachange International VoD servers with its Bandwidth Manager. Since each VoD service is unicast, each stream takes up as much bandwidth as a TV channel across the network, which requires a clear QoS policy system for bandwidth management. So this might also be what’s happening among the Orca customers, a rise in the use of VoD and a need to control it.