This document is identical to SCTE 175 2011 except for informative components which may have been updated such as the title page, NOTICE text, headers and footers. No normative changes have been made to this document.
Given the rapidly developing competitive market environment and subscriber sensitivity to program stream impairments, network devices in these applications are required, ideally, to operate without errors of any kind – ever. Or, should an error be unavoidable, it ought to be short and, therefore, minimize its impact to subscribers. IP Network devices including data switches and routers are increasingly being deployed in the transport of large numbers of flows of streaming video over IP in MSO transport environments. Program streams have somewhat different characteristics and transport requirements than VoIP and data. MSO Operations Groups now use measurements of per-program Availability in evaluating the operation of deployed equipment. Thus, availability Metrics are being deployed by major video service providers to measure and monitor the end-to-end per-program systems performance in their plants. Achieving low numbers of per-program errored seconds to the subscriber through monitoring and management techniques is also the subject of recent SCTE standards such as SCTE 168-6 2010. This RP is intended to specify means to evaluate whether a network device is capable of delivering a desired per-program availability performance level; i.e., 3 nines (99.9%), 4 nines (99.99%), etc. The testing and evaluation specified in this document is intended to be applied during the product evaluation and selection phase before deployment. Comparing test results from different products will help guide the selection of products best suited to delivering high availability streaming media over IP networks typical of MSO deployments.
