Net Insight's Nimbra system helps IPTV operators enhance the end-user’s experience and drives improved revenue, reduced churn rates and increased renewals. Nimbra is an excellent choice for large-scale, reliable IPTV multicast applications due to its low capital costs and its ability to reduce operating expenses at the same time.
Market
IPTV is exploding, with predictions of over 50 million subscribers in 2010 becoming increasingly assured. IPTV brings great opportunities to telco companies that must compete more effectively with cable and satellite firms to deliver content. This technology allows network operators to leverage their established customer base to offer Triple Play bundles using largely existing infrastructure. It all makes sense if you can bring all the technical elements you need together using proven tools and technologies that are well adapted for IPTV multicast infrastructures.
Challenges
Large scale IPTV deployments face two major networking challenges:
- Deploying, maintaining and expanding large scale multicast delivery systems that can transport content reliably from the network Head End to the access network POPs.
- Maintaining the high levels of quality that consumers have come to expect in HDTV program content.
Traditional IP-based systems handle some of these challenges, but they rarely are capable of delivering 100% quality all the time. Dropping IP packets is normal behavior as a method for handling congestion in many of the data applications for which IP/MPLS routers are designed. However, few IPTV consumers will stuck with a service that delivers constant video hits, frozen frames or blank screens. As successful services expand, the problem becomes even more acute and extremely difficult to solve without spending a lot of money on additional bandwidth and parallel IP routing systems. The last thing any engineer needs is to learn that a service is so successful that it starts to fail.
Net Insight offering
The Nimbra platform is specifically designed to do a brilliant job of distributing high quality video content in a scalable, bandwidth-efficient system. It works well with HD as well as SD content and provides 100% Quality of Service for mission critical IPTV applications. Our engineers are extremely familiar with the nuances and problems associated with properly handling video material. They also understand IP and optical networking topologies fully. They bring all this knowledge and experience to bear in the design of the Nimbra products and systems.
We use Layer 2 for multicast distribution and provision the distribution tree using a signaled control plane accessed via the Network Management System. Simply select the input and output Ethernet ports and the desired capacity to provision the multicast distribution tree. Add and remove destination ports without affecting the existing distribution set up. In the event of network failures, the Nimbra system automatically restores the multicast tree in a matter of milliseconds. Your customers will never even realize there was a problem.
The Nimbra platform guarantees 100% Quality of Service by using channelization for the transport between ingress and egress ports. Never losing a packet means no video hits or frozen screens on your customers’ television sets.
The Nimbra 600 series chassis support up to 16 of our 8-port Gigabit Ethernet modules, providing very high density in a telco-class box. We also have 4-port STM-1/4/16 and 1-port STM-64 ports that let you connect to dark fiber, WDM or SDH ports for maximum flexibility.
Key benefits
The major benefits of the Nimbra platform for IPTV primary distribution are:
- Scalable and easy manageable IP multicast specifically designed for TV distribution
- Reliable network and service expansion with nonstop operation of existing services
- Guaranteed IPTV transport completely avoiding packet loss
- Highly scalable solution allowing introduction of VoD and network PVR services