IPTV's test and management continuum

Billing & OSS World recently highlighted the ongoing test and management challenges that telcos face long after IPTV services emerge from their pre-launch lab environments. Bill DeMuth, CTO and senior vice president at SureWest Communications (and something of a celebrity in IPTV circles) testifies: "The initial integration of our IPTV and FTTH systems is just one aspect of our ability to deliver converged services. The ongoing operations, upgrading, regression testing, interfacing to OSS systems, etc., is where our lab becomes an invaluable tool that provides us the ability to deliver differentiated and highly reliable services to our customers."

He further added, "The lab is not only used to integrate and test products prior to release, it is also an important tool that allows us to investigate and troubleshoot anomalies that may be reported by customers, but that might be hard to replicate and fix in a production environment. The lab systems also give us the capability to upgrade systems or implement software patches in a test environment prior to customer trials or live deployment."

For more:
- B/OSS has the full story

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