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Tollgrade's Cheetah CMD-E: Boosting Cable VoIP Quality

Posted on: Saturday, 20 August 2005, 03:01 CDT

www.tollgrade.com

It's no understatement that the cable industry lacks a reputation for quality service delivery. To be fair, cable never really needed to be all that reliable when it was only offering entertainment television. Now, as cable moves into voice, reliability steps up 10 rungs in importance, and guaranteeing both a quality signal and reliable performance become paramount.

Consequently, Tollgrade Communications has a ready market for a product. The Cheetah CMD-E DOCSIS-compliant transponder uses a DOCSIS cable modem to gather realtime call quality metrics, identify problems, and provide comprehensive VoIP data to cable operators.

Tollgrade differentiates itself from other test equipment vendors by placing its product where it says it's needed most: in the network where cable operators are experiencing the most VoIP problems, all the way to the coaxial cable plant.

"From an HFC (hybrid fiber/coax) perspective, everything may appear to be looking great. You have the head end talking to the end points and everything in between might seem fine ... but you can be operating on the ragged edge and not really know if you are to the digital cliff unless you're doing a better job of monitoring and benchmarking," said Michael Harris, president and principal analyst for Kinetic Strategies. "It's almost weather forecasting, like HFC meteorology."

Greg Quiggle, Tollgrade's executive vice president of marketing, called the new product "the only economical way to be able to sample VoIP call quality without impacting the customer at that point in the network."

The product leverages DOCSISbased test equipment that Tollgrade had been positioning in power supplies located in cable nodes serving 250 to 400 homes. The performance software operates through a cable modem mid-span in a cable HFC network, where it does test calls on a scheduled basis and feeds back call quality results based on established parameters.

The operator can "place VoIP calls, receive VoIP calls and for all established calls measure delay, loss, jitter and mean opinion score," Quiggle said. "Once the call is established, whether that system calls us or we call that system, or we're calling another transponder, we measure delay, loss, jitter and can calculate an MOS with each active call."

Tollgrade's Cheetah CMO-E DOCSISCompliant Transponder

Questionable calls generate alarms, and operators can repair what might be the start of a deteriorating situation. The DOCSIS modem gathers so much data that Tollgrade offers to winnow it down through different packages it sells to cable operators.

Since the cable operator is already putting transponders in the field, adding the modem and getting the test capabilities is about a $50 to $100 add on to the typical $200 transponder cost.

"This lets the cable operators get some extra hang for their buck when they put a transponder out there and also solves a huge challenge they have in that today's VoIP test systems are focused on testing more in the core network," Quiggle said.

Using cable modems to gather system information is not new, Hams said.

"You can go back to the clays when Continental (Cablevision) was having folks slap LANCity modems onto electric poles to be able to use the amount of data they get from RF levels and all that information about the HFC plant. That's hugely valuable, not to mention all the IP statistics," Harris said.

Gathering this information from within the core network via a modem and relaying it over IP to the cable modem termination system then on to the operating system is different.

"Test systems today do a very good job of monitoring the core and the IP backbone network," Quiggle said. "They don't really have far enough reach into the HFC plant to test or sample call quality at that most problematic point in the network."

And when it comes to VoIP and reliability, cable, with its past lurking like an unshakable stalker, can't afford any foul-ups.

"This is an industry that's moving from best-effort services to QoS, and there's a huge transformation in mindset, operations and infrastructure," Harris said. "The category is hugely important in general."

Copyright Horizon House Publications, Inc. Aug 2005

Source: Telecommunications Americas

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