As IP services proliferate, keeping them up and running to the same uptime and quality metrics as traditional telephony services is becoming a challenge for all service providers.

Assuring the service quality of just one IP service is tough enough. But add an array of services -- VoIP, IP-based data, IP video/TV and more -- running over a converged IP network, and ensuring that all of those services are delivered properly becomes even tougher.

While subscribers might live with some jitter on a VoIP call -- especially if the price is right -- mess with their TV picture quality or drop their Internet connection too often and you’ll not only have unhappy customers you’ll have former customers as they head off to the competition.

“The thing that is driving the service assurance market right now is next-generation services being converged on all-IP networks,” said Olga Yashkova, measurement and instrumentation analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “Assuring the quality of the end-user experience is crucial, otherwise [service providers] will lose their subscribers. Customers are tolerant if their VoIP or cell phone call isn’t perfect; but if they can’t see the Super Bowl, they’re going to get very mad very fast.”

Because of the urgency in keeping IP services and triple-play bundles up, running and competitive, look for vendors delivering IP service assurance products and solutions to be well represented at the upcoming NXTcomm08 show. Among the vendors with IP Service Assurance products and solutions at the show are EXFO, Ixia, Tekelec, Tektronix, Symmetricom and Spirent.

Pre-show conversations with vendors indicate a variety of vendors will be showing testing and monitoring products that can play a key role in carrier service assurance programs. Also on tap are several expected new product launches, focusing on areas including quality-of-experience (QOE) measurement, triple-play service monitoring and in-home network testing, the latter an important emerging area of focus as consumer networks begin to “extend” the carrier network and impact overall service quality.

Vendor Apparent Networks, while not delivering the news at NXTcomm08, is targeting late June for a major release of its AppCritical platform (v3.5) that will focus heavily on IP service assurance, aimed specifically at IP video and voice service assurance, analysis and simulation, according to a company spokesman.

Driving all of these developments is the need to test and monitor converged services on converged IP networks.

“It’s really the competitive differentiation of the [service] bundle that is driving IP services and service assurance monitoring. Because of the fiercely competitive nature of next-generation services, and the fact that customers have a lot of choices where they can go to get those services, carriers really need to get it right the first time,” said John Burnham, vice president of marketing for EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering. Burnham joined EXFO from Brix Networks, which EXFO acquired in April to advance its service assurance capabilities.

The former Brix technology provides VoIP and IPTV testing with tools to measure signaling quality (signaling path performance), delivery quality (media transport performance) and content quality (overall quality of experience). Those capabilities form EXFO’s new service assurance division, and when combined with the vendor’s existing R&D and pre-installation test capabilities enable EXFO to offer “total network assessment” testing and monitoring tools, “from the physical layer up to the services layer,” Burnham said.

That range of capabilities tracks with the overall test and monitoring trend among carriers of focusing on the health of the service, not just the network. From a testing perspective, that includes simulating and testing actual services -- and not just evaluating network conditions -- when turning up and testing an initial deployment and then passively monitoring the ongoing service to ensure it is meeting key quality metrics.

“Some carriers, for instance BT, are actually starting to watch the service first; that then points to the network issues,” Burnham said. “That’s a trend we’re really starting to see mature.”

Just as importantly, on open IP networks, carriers -- and not network equipment vendors -- are the collectors and owners of all of that performance data, information that can be used not only to improve today’s services but to glean insight that can be used to upsell and cross-sell new services, EXFO’s Burnham said.

The focus on using service performance data as a competitive edge is driven by an increased carrier focus on customer service and the need to compete for customers, said Gaurang Kalyanpur, director of service marketing for Tekelec.

“Services providers today are driven by trends in subscriber demand,” Kalyanpur said. “The technology in place to serve that demand is really a hodgepodge of things; the network is reaching out and growing like an amoeba. The key thing to do as a service provider, then, is to get a view on the end-to-end quality of my services and determine if my network is behaving properly.”

The focus on customer service is particularly sharp for telcos beginning to provide IPTV services, especially those that compete directly with incumbent cable TV providers. When it comes to video, customers have very little patience with fuzz, or when it comes to HD, digital artifacts such as picture blockiness or jerkiness.

To highlight such concerns, vendor Symmetricom this week released a video, dubbed “Ten Video Quality Nightmares,” which highlights typical video quality problems and the network problems that cause them. IPTV-delivered video, in particular, requires constant monitoring to ensure that service quality remains high even as available network bandwidth fluctuates, video streams are manipulated via digital ad insertion and set-top boxes flail away at simultaneously decoding video signals, managing UI overlays, dealing with rapid channel clicks and overseeing digital video recordings, among other tasks, according to Joyce Kim, Symmetricom’s vice president of marketing.

“Operators face challenges to ensure video service quality meets the growing customer quality expectations or face high operations costs, high customer churn and slower service deployment,” Kim said.

While IPTV has its own special requirements, operators have a strong desire to test all the services on their network, not just one siloed offering, said Frost & Sullivan analyst Yashkova.