Symmetricom Announces IPTV Probe for Monitoring Triple Play Service Quality of Experience and Quality of Service

Business Wire, June 18, 2007

Q-400 IPTV Probe Delivers Carrier Class, End-to-End Network Performance Visibility for QoE and QoS of Advanced Services Including IPTV and VoIP

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Symmetricom, Inc. (NASDAQ:SYMM), a worldwide leader in precise time and frequency technologies that accelerate the deployment and enable the management of next generation networks, today announced the new Q-400 IPTV Probe. The probe delivers carrier class, cost-effective and scalable end-to-end network performance visibility and quality assurance for service providers offering triple play services, including IPTV and VoIP. It enables quality of service (QoS) assurance for the core network and quality of experience (QoE) using Symmetricom's V-Factor[R] to provide visibility to IPTV service quality just as a user is experiencing it in real time.

"For IPTV, three closely related factors are essential: the quality of video itself, its error-free delivery over a network, and the quality of experience encountered by the consumer," said Steven Hawley, Senior IPTV Analyst for Multimedia Research Group Inc, a leading market analysis company. "Operators that perform rigorous test and measurement, to objective benchmarks -- for both live and on-demand content -- have the greatest likelihood to capture new subscribers and keep them loyal."

The new Q-400 monitors up to 400 SD or HD H264 IPTV streams and up to 10,000 VoIP streams in parallel in full passive mode. Scoring of streams is presented with the familiar Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for VoIP (ITU G107 Model) and for IPTV in the V-Factor MOS score, similar to the MPQM Model. The new IPTV probe will be demonstrated at NXTcomm 07, June 18-21, 2007 in Chicago, Illinois, Booth #1156.

"Symmetricom has been in the triple play services assurance business for nearly eight years and the first to measure performance for any streaming media including HDTV/SDTV, IPTV, VoD and VoIP," commented Yves Cognet, chief technology officer for Symmetricom's QoE Assurance Division. "Symmetricom's latest IPTV probe works end-to-end, enabling rapid identification of symptoms affecting network health in the core network all the way to a customer's premise equipment (CPE), providing QoE to assure the customer experience as well as traditional QoS to assure core network performance. The Q-400 gives carriers and service providers the measurement tools they need to improve revenues and profits by increasing customer satisfaction while lowering technical support costs."

Symmetricom's triple play ready network probes enable passive and active monitoring for video, voice and data applications for quality assurance over IP, and are core components of Symmetricom's QoE solutions to monitor and diagnose quality impairments. Symmetricom's QoE solutions provide a reliable benchmark (MOS score) that enables CSPs to monitor and diagnose VoIP, as well as the perceptual impact of video quality impairments that may be introduced by either transmission over an IP network or from artifacts introduced by various encoding methodologies. Symmetricom's high performance network probes collect and report aggregate statistics in real time for customer flow simulations and traffic flow analysis.

Monitoring IPTV streams and VoIP streams in parallel in full passive mode, the triple play ready Q-400 offers the following features:

* Scores up to 400 IPTV streams simultaneously (V-Factor MOS score) and up to 10,000 VoIP streams (ITU G107 MOS score) or a mix

* Supports active IGMP Join/Leave for active channel monitoring and monitoring of channel leave/join time (zap)

* Supports unicast as well as multicast in full passive mode

* Supports HD as well as SD

* Supports MPEG2TS for any MPEG2 or H264 IPTV stream, and AUDIO and VIDEO scoring

Symmetricom network probes support all relevant Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards for Internet Protocol (IP) performance metrics and the internationally accepted ITU Y.1541 specifications as well as ETSI TR 101290. They also support IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, as well as unicast or multicast-based RTP/RTCP applications such as VoIP and SIP based applications such as ToIP. They are fully compatible with Symmetricom's centralized management and reporting NOC software and software agents and run the entire library of Symmetricom software, including V-Factor for optimum video/audio performance. V-Factor measures QoE from a customer's point of view and is based on the Moving Pictures Quality Metrics (MPQM) model adapted specifically for end-to-end video quality scoring. It is the first and only video quality metric that takes into account both network and content impairments.

"We've implemented the Q-400 in HP's Grenoble IPTV Solution Center as part of our comprehensive OSS for IPTV offering," commented Norman Kincl, Solutions Manager, Communications, Media and Entertainment, HP. "Our customers need carrier-class, end-to-end visibility into network performance, and the Symmetricom IPTV probe helps us measure the delivered video quality. Its improved flexibility, capacity and scalability enable us to deliver enhanced quality of experience with quality of service, and ultimately, real business value for our customers."