"What we have is the Internet TV equivalent of half-time at the Super Bowl and millions of traditional TV viewers suddenly running water and using the phone," says Robert Winters, co-founder of Shenick Network Systems.

"In our case, an Internet TV (IPTV) provider can have hundreds of thousands of customers using the system in various ways, 24 hours a day. The quality of experience the users enjoy has always been a major concern and it is even more so, now that telecom companies are offering so-called triple play services - high-speed Internet, video (IPTV) and voice applications, such as delay-sensitive VoIP. Zhone Technologies of Oakland, California, provides the industry with superb triple-play infrastructure, and I am happy to announce that they are now using Shenick's diversifEye as a prime quality testing tool."

Essentially, diversifEye is 10,000 triple play users in a box. That is, it can emulate an almost infinite variety of user traffic scenarios, with IPTV, high-speed internet, voice applications, streaming and other services all running simultaneously.

It can show how a system responds to everything from one IPTV viewer's experience all the way up to the endless traffic variations generated by millions of Internet users. Accordingly, diversifEye provides a highly granular test tool, in that it gives the testers a close look at one grain of sand or the entire beach in every imaginable circumstance. No other testing tool in the industry has this one-to-millions scalability.

"We understand that, at the end of the day, triple play's all about the user's quality of experience" says Steve Klein, Zhone's director of Video Services Products. "There is zero compromise, when it comes to issues such as IPTV quality, and Zhone required a highly granular, realistic perspective on service and performance, right down to the individual viewer level."

Using diversifEye, Zhone has created a highly sophisticated array of tests. For example, they can measure and compare the quality of service received by an IPTV viewer who changes channels every few minutes and one who thumbs the remote every few seconds; and, of course, thousands of users with differing change rates can be built into a test, as well.

"And it doesn't stop there," says Shenick's Robert Winters. "diversifEye is stackable, so if two chassis are connected, you'll double the number of emulated users, and so forth. It can also emulate household usage. In Europe, telecom companies are already delivering IPTV to people's television sets. That will be in North America soon. So, it's essential for Zhone to be able to create and test household usage profiles, in which, say, one person is on the Web, one is using the phone and others are watching TV, and diversifEye gives them that capability, too. I don't know much about baseball, but I understand that a triple play is extremely rare. Our customers execute their triple plays every second of the day."