ip coverstory_cover story 07/03/2014 08:34 Page 2
COVER STORY
“Standards
themselves do
not guarantee
interoperability.”
Yuval Fisher,
RGB Networks
almost in
place; we’re in
the final stages
of publishing
an OIPF spec that pulls a number of elements
together in one clear way. Standards remain
important - as a matter of fact, in a world
where operators increasingly deliver to CE
equipment purchased directly by consumers,
standards are only becoming more important.
He says that when supported by
standards, IPTV can still be a managed
service, with guaranteed throughput and
quality (QoE and QoS). “Also services that are
delivered over the top can be of good
QoS/QoE, and standards like DASH as used
in HbbTV allow graceful degradation in case
bandwidth (temporarily) isn’t quite there.
Enabling IPTV is the intended purpose for
OIPF, and a perhaps unintended effect of
HbbTV’s work. As an intended consequence,
HbbTV gives broadcasters the option to
provide services with great QoE, as instead of
having to go through a smart TV
environment, users can now access services
right from the broadcast.”
Ronen Segal, CTO, Comigo, says that
standards do not necessarily guarantee
interoperability; it depends on whether they
are ‘telco’ standards or ‘open’ standards. “On
one end of the spectrum, an open standard is
generally considered royalty-free and can be
re-used at any time; so money is not a factor
when defining it. On the other end, telco
standards are defined by a group
of companies that would each like to see their
patents included in order to receive royalties
when the standard is used. With money being
such a huge factor, it’s not uncommon to have
similar standards defined by different groups
of companies, which actually degrades
interoperability instead of improving it,” he
advises. As for QoS/QoE, standards don’t
provide any guarantees there either, he
suggests. “New standards are defined with
specific sets of goals and assumptions, and
QoS/QoE isn’t often at the top of the list.”
CONSTRAINTS. Dave Robinson, chief
video architect, Alcatel-Lucent, notes that at
the beginning of IPTV, network capacity was
severely constrained and that had the biggest
impact on QoS. “Standards were important to
carefully manage video traffic just to get it to
the end user. Now, however, there’s much
greater bandwidth in both the
core and the access networks.
We also have better
compression techniques and
HTTP based adaptive
streaming technologies that
adapt far better to varying
available bandwidth. Today,
video is treated just like any
other IP data packet, where
technologies to manage QoS are highly
developed and operators can deploy web
based optimisation technol