Author Archives: Steve Parry

MiriMON provide a unique view of customer QoE, service consumption and faults with the consumer device, the network segment and the individual service.

This information, derived from the STB in the customer’s home, enables the operator to provide a more reliable service and more effective customer support, which improves subscriber retention.

The information also enables operational cost reductions and more effective investment in infrastructure, content and service packaging.

Here are just some of the comments from delighted customers:

COMSTAR Direct:

COMSTAR is a Russian IPTV operator, with 150,000 customers They bought MiriMON in 2008, as a superior alternative to probe and network equipment-based monitoring of QoE. After the successful initial deployment of MiriMON, Victor Belov, CTO of COMSTAR-Direct, said:
“Imagine you have a professional IPTV analyser installed at every household? Now imagine you have carrier-class real-time and historical reporting, consuming data from those hundreds of thousands of analysers, giving you any view, any time? And you have this at a very reasonable per-customer cost? This is the Mirifice MiriMON solution. You cannot monitor IPTV service on every DSLAM and access switch, on every cable closet. That is unreasonably expensive. But you can do it better. MiriMON is resident on every CPE device in use. Overlaying information from MiriMON onto our network topology, we see a crystal-clear service delivery
picture, end-to-end.”

COMSTAR Direct was able to measure the actual number of subscribers viewing each TV Channel. This provided COMSTAR with evidence to re-negotiate its content licensing. The savings on content license fees justified the entire cost of the MiriMON system: providing a quick Return on Investment.

COMSTAR-Direct provides a number of TV channels from outside Russia to its subscribers. These channels are acquired as a satellite feed and are then re-encoded for IP broadcast in Russia. MiriMON was able to identify that one of these channels was suffering a periodic fault due to poor source encoding. This problem was not identified by any other systems or equipment alarms.

Europa – Spain:

Alan Dobinson, MD of Europa, in Spain, commented:
“MiriMON was a must-have if we were to achieve our business goals. It has provided us with the intelligence to decide when and where to invest in our platform to have maximum impact on service delivery to our customers, and to be able to see the impact of this investment in real-time. We were so convinced by the business advantage offered by MiriMON, that it influenced our choice of set-top box platform – we made MiriMON support a pre-requisite for our set-top box.”

A North American IPTV operator:

During the pilot deployment of MiriMON, the operations team noticed that one particular channel was providing a poor customer experience. It transpired that one of the operator’s engineers had recently modified the encoding regime of the channel to reduce the stream bit rate. The engineer had concerns that the stream modifications might impact the quality of the channel delivered to
customers. MiriMON provided quantitative measurements from end-customer devices to show that the stream quality was indeed compromised by the new encoding regime. The operator changed the bit rate and customer experience was regained.

A large European Cable TV Operator:

During a trial, MiriMON identified that an interactive application was
loading incorrectly on a particular STB. The memory consumed by the interactive application would not be correctly release when the application was closed. This problem was not directly noticeable to the user, as there was no immediate adverse effect. However, when the STB was next required to load or execute a memory intensive process it would hang or crash. MiriMON identified the source of this intermittent fault.

A large European Telco:

This Telco was offering interactive TV over Broadband:
MiriMON enables the Telco to see the actual QoE delivered to the customer, regardless of whether the service is delivered over the Telco’s own Broadband service or via another ISPs network. This helps the Telco to manage the customer experience and to enforce SLAs. The consumer device supplied by the Telco also provides access to the national free-to-air TV channels broadcast over DVB-T. MiriMON’s ability to also monitor the status and quality of terrestrial TV service allows the Telco to support the consumer, identifying when there are potential problems with the arial or home cabling.

A European IPTV operator:

A key factor in selecting MiriMON was the ability to integrate MiriMON into an existing sophisticated set of systems for Network Management and Customer Care. MiriMON can provide information and alerts via its native UI and via published and maintained integration interfaces.