Sonaecom has selected Cisco's Visual Quality Experience technology for its Clix SmarTV IPTV service. Sonaecom currently offers IPTV services to subscribers across Portugal via an ADSL network and plans to reach 1 million homes via an optical fiber-to-the-home network by 2010.

Service providers are working to evolve their network into a medianet. A medianet represents an advanced, intelligent network optimized for video and rich media communications. It enables service providers to consistently deliver the best-quality video possible. With medianet technologies, Sonaecom can optimize the scalability, performance and user experience of rich media, especially video.

In addition to using Cisco's Carrier Ethernet solutions, Sonaecom is taking advantage of Cisco VQE error-repair and monitoring technologies to detect and repair packet loss, thereby significantly improving video quality.

By anticipating and diagnosing problems that threaten successful IPTV service delivery and implementing error repair via the network, Sonaecom can potentially increase service acceptance.

The deployment of Cisco VQE standards-based technology will allow Sonaecom's network to support new features, including rapid channel change. Rapid channel change reduces channel-change times from several seconds to less than one second, a key advantage as service providers like Sonaecom expand their IPTV offerings and provide more content and programming choices for consumers.

Cisco VQE is part of the Cisco Content Delivery System, a highly extensible platform that helps service providers offer a variety of services to subscribers, including video on demand, time-shifted television, ad insertion, streaming-intensive Web services, user-generated content and next-generation content delivery network services.