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SCTE publishes standards 168-4 168-6 and 168-7
April 25, 2010 | By Anthony Capkun
April 25, 2010
The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) published three new industry technical standards to provide cable operators with “new reliability tools to ensure, measure and improve the customer experience”. These recommended practices are the first in a planned series of standards designed to provide a common method for verifying the health of digital cable networks.
Developed under the auspices of SCTE’s HFC Management Subcommittee
(HMS), the SCTE 168 standards describe a framework for managing network
components (end-to-end) by providing information to operators. This data
will allow the monitoring of network performance with the aim of making
multimedia over IP, QAM, ASI and other network elements visible
throughout the signal chain—from headend to customer.
The three published standards are:
Metrics”, which provides a common methodology for defining the
measurement points and ‘quality’ metrics of interest in digital cable
networks that impair compressed multimedia (video/audio/data) quality.
SCTE 168-6 “Recommended Practice for Monitoring Multimedia Distribution
Quality”, which provides background and discussion on multimedia
management (MMM) system requirements to assist the cable operator with
MMM deployment design tradeoffs, and provide guidance and
recommendations on several topics related to the deployment of these
systems.
SCTE 168-7 “Recommended Practice for Transport Stream Verification in an
IP Transport Network”, which describes the protocols within the IP
network and the possible IP layer causes of media impairments, but does
not provide metrics that correlate specific IP failures to media
impairments.
The SCTE Standards Program will submit the standards to ANSI for
approval as national standards. The three HMS 168 standards are
available—along with other SCTE technical standards—on the society’s
website.
CLICK HERE for SCTE.
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