A national telecommunications company needed to provide live video for a major sports league.
Joining forces with the client and their network monitoring equipment company we delivered a solution that ensured uninterrupted video replay services, meeting the league’s strict performance requirements.
Video review is essential in sports telecasts. With millions of fans watching and millions of advertising revenue dollars at stake, video replay must arrive immediately and in perfect condition so officials can use footage to review, validate, or overturn calls.
This presents a unique challenge for telecommunications carriers who need to send critical live video over a packet network to transmit delay-tolerant data communications.
Unlike typical data, live video cannot tolerate retransmissions, buffering delays, or reduced bandwidth.
Furthermore, monitoring equipment must analyze live video and inject management data without disrupting the network. Installing monitoring tools directly on communication links could risk service outages if equipment fails or loses power.
Therefore, the telecommunications carrier required specialized tools to maintain live video quality and ensure continuous traffic flow without impacting reliability.
We chose the Network Critical equipment because of its unique functionality and for the Drag ’n Vu Graphical Interface, which simplifies initial deployment and makes ongoing management fast and easy.” - Sr. Systems Engineer, Telecommunications Company
To overcome this challenge, SmartNA Bypass TAPs from Network Critical were selected to safely connect monitoring equipment to network links.
This solution keeps network traffic flowing even if monitoring equipment goes offline, enabling the carrier to maintain their service level commitment to the sports league.
Network Critical test access points (TAPs) offer a range of essential features, including the ability to inject management packets back into the network, ensuring consistent and orderly packet transfer.
They’re designed to handle live video traffic at high bandwidth to prevent issues like pixelation, jitter, and other delays that could distort the final image.
In contrast, management traffic doesn’t require the same level of bandwidth, allowing the TAPs to provide both high-speed connections for video and lower-speed links for management injection. Additionally, the SmartNA TAPs facilitate media conversion, enabling seamless connections between fiber and copper equipment when needed. To enhance usability, the innovative Drag ’n Vu Graphical user interface allows carriers to quickly and easily configure, deploy, and manage the system.
“We were looking for a safe way to connect our monitoring equipment to provide important analysis and inject management data back into the network to manage these critical video links in real time. Our challenge was to do this in real time without jeopardizing network reliability. Network Critical was the ideal product to meet all of our requirements.” - Director, Business Operations, Telecommunications Company
Network Critical’s Bypass TAPs empowered the sports league to provide flawless video replay, enhancing fan experiences. The solution delivered:
The league achieved greater fan engagement with Network Critical and set the standard for replay booth reliability.
Network Critical is an industry leader in network access technology. Our quality 1/10/25/40/100G modular TAP and Packet Broker solutions ensure that our customers have continuous network visibility. Network Critical products eliminate any concerns of downtime and our unique scale-out capabilities enable simple, cost effective expansion, as network and port density requirements grow. The health of your network is always secure with Network Critical products. Our fully flexible range of TAPs and Packet Brokers are used with IDS, IPS, network traffic monitoring tools, sniffers and many other mission critical appliances, to provide 100% network visibility with zero packet loss. With over 20 years experience, a number of industry “firsts” and a reputation for excellent customer service, Network Critical’s solutions are widely used in global networks across a wide range of sectors including Finance, Telco, Government, Energy and Healthcare.