Ixia, a leading, global provider of IP performance test systems, announced today the latest release of its comprehensive IPTV testing solution, Aptixia IxLoad 3.10, capable of assessing all aspects of IPTV service infrastructure to ensure subscribers' Quality of Experience (QoE). Ixia's IPTV testing solution consists of IxLoad -- part of Ixia's family of Aptixia applications -- and Ixia's Optixia hardware test platform. The solution is part of Ixia's converged multi-services test offerings, delivering unmatched functionality and scalability on a single test platform, which reduces the total cost of ownership compared to multi-platform solutions.

"As Bell Canada moves quickly to offer Triple Play services to our customers, the Aptixia IxLoad test application from Ixia allows us to accurately test and verify multiple vendor network elements on a multitude of IP service offerings in our pre-deployment lab," said Dave Burns, director of IP Service Delivery Testing at Bell Canada. "This enables us to properly groom and configure our production network prior to launching IP services, saving us time and unnecessary operational expense."

IxLoad is used by service providers and equipment manufacturers to assess different aspects of the video delivery infrastructure, including:

• Determine video quality as perceived by the IPTV subscriber
• Verify the scalability of video servers to deliver multicast and on-demand content
• Assess the performance of multicast routers for broadcast IPTV delivery
• Validate transport and access network capacity

"Using Ixia's IxLoad test application enables our team at Alcatel's Strategic Solutions Lab to simulate realistic test environments depicting Triple Play networks," said Patti Van Bruggen, Manager, Alcatel CTO Strategic Solutions Lab North America. "IxLoad provides valuable insights into the performance of various end-to-end networking components. Additionally, it offers a means to validate the impact of various 'parameter tunings' by measuring the overall effects of imposed network changes. We are pleased with its feature richness, its measurement capabilities and its ease of use."

Video quality is paramount to subscriber experience in the delivery of Triple Play services. IPTV service providers need to deliver superior quality to gain market share and avoid subscriber churn. The industry is in the process of developing standard metrics for assessing video quality. Two types of metrics have emerged - perceptual-based metrics representing the subscribers' true video viewing experience, and network-based metrics which reflect the impact on video by the transport network. Ixia's IxLoad 3.10 release adds support for perceptual-based metrics -- including VQS and V-factor -- that take into account video frame types and can be correlated to actual video content. These new metrics are in addition to the network-based video quality metric -- MDI -- already supported by IxLoad.

IxLoad 3.10 adds support for several additional key features for IPTV testing, including:

• MPEG over RTP for both VoD and Broadcast IPTV
• MPEG4 over MPEG2 transport
• MPEG level frame statistics
• PPP, IPSec and DHCP for subscriber access protocol emulation

IxLoad 3.10 will be available for general release in early Q3'2006.

For more information, see: http://www.ixiacom.com/ixload.