Mariner Navigates HD Upgrades

Q&A With CEO Curtis Howe

by George Winslow -- Multichannel News, 2/2/2010 10:57:22 AM

Mariner has been working with phone companies launching Internet-protocol television service since 1997. Today, the St. John, Canada-based company offers a variety of technologies for debugging problems in IPTV networks, as well as consulting and integration services. Mariner president, CEO and co-founder Curtis Howe talked with HD Update contributor George Winslow about some of the unique problems facing telcos as they expand their high-definition offerings.

 

MCN: What are some of the challenges facing telcos as they try to launch and then expand their HD services?


Beyond that, if you look at a complete architectural map of the IPTV ecosystem, from headend to set-top, virtually every area is impacted. The fact that there are so many moving parts in the network and the fact that all of them are being changed at once creates some of the biggest challenges.

In a big telco, you can take the problems into a lab and you run hundreds or thousands of regression tests until you debug these problems. But in a smaller telco, you often don't have the luxury of a lab and you have limited personnel to work with. We found the sheer number of components -- whether it is software or hardware -- that change in the course of an HD upgrade [to be] a major challenge.

 

MCN: How do your products help deal with those issues?

CH: With our technology, we have inverted the conventional and time-honored method of monitoring and trouble-shooting an IP network. Rather than monitoring the status of a particular network device or even a series of network devices, we concentrate on understanding the quality of experience that is being delivered into the home and we have a series of technologies help us understand that.

Our solutions are all software-based and can be downloaded into the system to work with the middleware. If it is a Microsoft Mediaroom system, we can piggy-back the existing Microsoft Mediaroom technology to assess how well the service is working.

To do that, we go all the way to end of the delivery chain and look at what is happening there. If you imagine putting low cost probes into every single home, that is what we are doing. We harvest all that data and correlate it to understand all the behavior of the network in each region, on each node, on each channel. We can tell you how many people are watching a particular channel and how many of them are getting a degraded service. We can tell you within a particular home if all the TVs are getting a good signal, if they can order video-on-demand, if the set-top box CPU is overloaded, etc.

So, we can go through an immense amount of data in real time and map that onto the network typology to very quickly find and solve some very elusive classes of problems that can take hours and hours the conventional way.

[Over time, we have also] built up a repository of case studies. Based on those, we've found solving problems the conventional way take 153 minutes. But with our technology, we can get this down to a five minute target.