GCI Tracks Customer Quality of Experience with Tektronix Video Monitoring Solution

BEAVERTON, Ore., Oct. 5, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Tektronix, an industry-leading innovator of video quality monitoring solutions, today announced that General Communication, Inc. (GCI), Alaska's largest integrated telecommunications provider, has selected the Tektronix Medius Video Quality Monitor along with Sentry Edge monitors to help ensure the best viewing experience possible for its customers.

Delivering a high-quality viewing experience to its video customers is a top priority for GCI and the firm continues to invest in technology enhancements and upgrades across its network, all backed by service level agreements (SLA) for uptime and responsiveness. In order to document the quality improvements, GCI needed a comprehensive network monitoring and reporting solution. After exploring a number of alternatives, GCI's network services department settled on a video quality monitoring solution from Tektronix.

"With the Medius in place we are able to focus on the problems that directly impact the customer experience," says John Berglin, headend engineer for GCI. "In the past we might have seen a problem on the network, but we had no way of knowing if it was impacting the customer. Medius can also tell us, for example, that while bits are flowing fine according to the network, packets are actually getting dropped and causing tiling which impacts the customer experience."

When network problems such as video or audio interruptions do occur, Medius gives call center operators a single interface for consolidated status alerts across GCI's network. This means that as customers call in operators can see the reason for the call on their screen and simply confirm that the problem is happening and advise customers on repair status.

"Some of the calls we receive are about temporary problems that self clear, such as an interruption in service from one of our providers. With Medius, the call center doesn't need to elevate these calls to the service department and can support the customer directly," Berglin explains. "And we also capture trend data so we can easily see where there might be a bigger problem in one area or another."

The accurate, reliable monitoring and reporting provided by the Tektronix solution compares favorably to some of the alternatives GCI considered. One system was not able to monitor audio. Another was unable to alarm on actual quality of experience (QoE) problems and produced a steady stream of costly false positives.

"It took some configuration to dial the Medius solution in. When we found something we wanted a little different, the Tektronix people would turn around and write us a patch in a day or two," Berglin relates. "I can't tell you how nice it is to work with a company that will actually address our needs instead of saying we're going to add that to an enhancements list that we're going to review in 90 days."

Based on the success with the Medius deployment at its primary headend, GCI now has plans to deploy Medius and Sentry systems in a number of additional cities including Juneau and Fairbanks.

GCI is the largest Alaska-based and -operated, integrated telecommunications provider, offering wireless, voice, data, and video services statewide. Learn more about GCI at www.gci.com.

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About Tektronix
Headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, Tektronix delivers innovative, precise and easy-to-operate test, measurement and monitoring solutions that solve problems, unlock insights and drive discovery. Tektronix has been at the forefront of the digital age for over 65 years. Join us on the journey of innovation at www.tektronix.com. 

Tektronix is a registered trademark of Tektronix, Inc. All other trade names referenced are the service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

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SOURCE Tektronix, Inc

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