Cogeco Cable has turned to Tektronix for quality of experience monitoring of its video and audio.
Cogeco is using Tektronix’s Sentry digital content monitor to help ensure that its video services are delivered with quality. Sentry’s monitoring capabilities enable the early detection and diagnosis of video and audio errors, which can help operators fix the underlying issues, and in many cases prevent costly in-home service appointments.
Cogeco Cable will deploy Sentry’s QoE and Perceptive Video Quality (PVQ) modules. With QoE, Sentry does a full decode of each MPEG packet looking for structural errors that cause picture and audio impairments. Each impairment is scored based on the severity, taking into account the frequency, duration and position on viewers’ screens of each impairment.
In addition to QoE, Sentry’s PVQ module detects picture blockiness and other artifacts caused by over-compression using an eMOS (effective Mean Opinion Score)-based scoring algorithm. Sentry’s combination of advanced QoE capabilities and PVQ provides Cogeco Cable with a comprehensive real-time monitoring and alerting system.
“Maintaining subscriber growth while reducing overall operating costs is a key initiative, and we believe Sentry’s exceptional monitoring and management capabilities will help us achieve our goals,” said Jacques Gravel, vice president of network services at Cogeco. “Everyone at Cogeco Cable is committed to service excellence, and deploying Sentry is the latest example of this commitment.”
Cogeco Cable will initially deploy Sentry in its master headend, where it will monitor the SD and HD programming throughout the company’s Ontario systems. Cogeco Cable will configure and manage its Sentry units using the Tektronix Medius application.
“Cogeco Cable has a well-deserved reputation for service excellence, and their choosing Sentry shows their commitment to providing services with the best-possible quality,” said Eben Jenkins, general manager of the video product line at Tektronix. “Sentry’s cutting-edge QoE and PVQ monitoring capabilities are perfect for forward-thinking operators like Cogeco Cable that recognize quality is a competitive advantage in today’s increasingly crowded multichannel video market.”
