Press Centre - Iskratel
7. 9. 2009

Embedded Ixia client for measuring QoE in Iskratel home gateways

Kranj, 7 September 2009 – Iskratel, together with Ixia, has announced a new and efficient embedded client for measuring the multi-play network quality of experience in Iskratel’s Home Gateways. Service providers who deploy Ixia’s IxRave with the client software embedded in Iskratel’s Home Gateways can now reliably and cost-effectively provide guaranteed customer quality-of-experience (QoE) monitoring to their multi-play subscribers.
Iskratel strives to offer solutions that significantly improve an operator's ability to reduce OPEX and provide its end customers with services of the highest quality. Iskratel, using high-end home gateways for ADSL2+, VDSL2 and FTTH, is constantly improving the customer's experience by developing and adapting its solutions in a highly competitive telecommunications market. The implementation of Iskratel high-end home gateways with the IxRave client is one of the solutions where all this is possible.

By implementing Ixia’s service-verification solution into the broadband multi-play network, service providers can monitor the end-to-end QoE for customers by proactively testing services and applications from the network core. The innovation of deploying software agents on the modems already installed at the customer's premises allows a higher level of customer quality monitoring than ever before on a carrier network. Working together to implement IxRave's client-monitoring capability, Ixia and Iskratel were able to implement a smooth and innovative deployment in the Slovenian telecommunications market to a large number of triple-play customers.

With IxRave, the operator's front-line customer-service technicians launch customer-experience tests from the call center in order to isolate and troubleshoot the issue from the network core to the subscriber home. This allows operators to send field technicians to only those subscriber homes that IxRave has identified as problem sites. IxRave thereby reduces unwarranted field dispatches, which in turn significantly reduces operating expenses.

IxRave uses a single test head in the network core to connect to customer premises’ embedded test agents, providing an accurate and non-intrusive monitoring of the customer’s experience. Working with Iskratel, the operators will provide its customers with home gateways that include an embedded IxRave software agent that allows the centralized test head to obtain a ground-level view of the customer’s quality of experience (QoE).

”We welcomed the opportunity to work with such an innovative company as Iskratel,” commented Walker Colston, Vice President, Converged Monitoring and Quality at Ixia. ”Iskratel proved to be a reliable and a highly competent partner for engineering quality and innovative solutions suitable for our demanding customers. Our cooperation opens doors for new opportunities.”