According to Bridge Technologies, Denmark’s TRE-FOR has reduced maintenance costs for its IPTV operation after deploying one of its monitoring and analysis systems.
TRE-FOR supplies broadband and digital media services to subscribers in the Southern Danish Triangle region via an all-fibre infrastructure, and with the advanced analysis provided by the VideoBRIDGE system, the company has been able to reduce maintenance staffing costs considerably.
Now providing services to three other networks, and with a tenfold rise in subscribers during 2010, TRE-FOR uses the VideoBRIDGE monitoring system to provide diagnosis and detailed analysis of service-affecting faults. After consultation with Bridge Technologies engineers and tailoring the system configuration to TRE-FOR’s needs, 85% of the previously experienced data errors were pinpointed by the system. Using the VB270 probe to monitor the data downloaded from satellite, TRE-FOR was able to diagnose problems with its dishes that were the cause of data errors resulting in failures downstream. The VideoBRIDGE system also identified bandwidth-eating errors caused by extraneous PIDs in the data, allowing TRE-FOR to recoup more than 20M of bandwidth as a result.
In addition to the probes at the headend, TRE-FOR’s VideoBRIDGE installation includes VB220 probes installed at the core sites, with VB220s and VB120s at access points. The system’s built-in reporting capability is used by staff to oversee the progress of new infrastructure as it is rolled out to support the growing subscriber base, and VideoBRIDGE service level reports are fed in to weekly management meetings to inform ongoing technical work.
“Within six weeks, TRE-FOR was able to see an immediate effect on operating expenses, and a distinct trend in patterns of service maintenance,” said Flemming Breum, CTO, TRE-FOR. “The ability to run the maintenance operation more efficiently while providing a very high level of service to subscribers is an important contributor to the successful expansion of the business.”
