US publication Light Reading has just published a lengthy exclusive report, where it convinced Cisco to test its end to end IPTV infrastructure, including its VSE regional packet resend utility, in a testing grid that emulated 60,000 live customer homes.
The results were collated by the European Advanced Networking Test Center AG (EANTC) and a full suit of triple play functions, including IPTV, VoIP, VoD, and internet access were run concurrently.
The resulting Light Reading report is well worth a read, but perhaps only if you are already a converted Cisco fan despite that fact that results appear to have been done at arms length, because they don’t specify some software elements or compare against anyone else’s hardware.
The test measured scalability of broadcast TV and VOD services, QoS with real-time video, voice, and data; high availability with sub-second failover time for all of the services; user experience for video services under high network load and with poor packet loss in the last mile
The results showed zero packet loss (no surprise there since the Cisco 7600 does packet resends) but then all these packet resends arrived in time, with set tops only having 200 milliseconds of buffer.
The system was shown to support 60,000 triple-play customers with 20 high-definition and 200 standard-definition video channels, 22-Gbps of VOD traffic, and additional Internet traffic
Up to 10% packet loss was artificially created in the last mile, and the VQE system of Cisco (Visual Quality of Experience) managed to cope with the required resends.
A team of 10 engineers from Cisco, EANTC, and Spirent Communications were involved in the test full time, from April to June 2007, culminating culminated in two weeks of day-and-night testing in Cisco labs. The software had to be production release or live beta, and the engineers only had the same type of time to set up the system or make amendments as a live installation might give.
We expect that the results will form a huge marketing push by Cisco into the end to end IPTV world.