CHICAGO--Agilent Technologies’ OSS group has added additional support to its NgN Analysis System to provide cable operators with end-to-end voice-over-IP management.

Agilent has added support for common open policy service (COPS) protocol and for Cedar Point softswitches. The system displays end-to-end call flow records for advanced performance metrics and real-time and historical troubleshooting.

In the cable space, Cox Communications has added 111,000 VoIP telephony customers in the first quarter, while cablevision has been adding 7000 customers per week to reach 400,000. Time Warner cable has more than 375,000 VoIP customers.

“This is the right product given that the number of VoIP subscribers is set to go from 2.4 million to 97 million by 2009,” said Paul Capozzoli, product manager for Agilent’s operations support systems division.

The system correlates COPS protocol with other protocols such as PacketCable network call signaling, trunking gateway control protocol, session initiation protocol and SS7 into a single, detailed call record in order to provide the capability for service providers to troubleshoot quality of experience problems. For advanced troubleshooting, complete decodes are available for all signaling messages. Network-wide call correlation supports networks using the Cedar Point Softswitch, associating subscribers' endpoint addresses with their phone numbers.

“Cable companies have realized that this service will have to work and work well, so measuring quality of service is critical,” Capozzoli said.

Part of that quality of service stems for the equipment’s ability to aggregate measurements by CMTS, the laser group and HFC Node,

Capozzoli said the system recently even solve a problem for a cable customer’s subscriber who had issues with TiVo that turned out to be an echo cancellation problem. “The cable company said that if they had to troubleshoot that problem in their traditional manner it would have been like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” he said.