Forced Upgrade Offers a Great Opportunity

Faced with aging and risky “end-of-life” video processing gear from companies like Cisco, Greenlight looked to WISI America for help in finding a solution. WISI’s Inca IP Video Platform and Tangram Video Platform not only provided state-of-the-art replacement for the obsolete gear, but Greenlight also gained operations and maintenance benefits not available from any other supplier.

Greenlight of North Carolina is the City of Wilson’s community-owned fiber optic network, which provides broadband and video services to homes and businesses in the city and surrounding area. As North Carolina’s first “Gigabit City,” Greenlight offers at least 1Gb/s connections to its residents. Greenlight commits to and provides the highest quality and reliability in its network, however as aging and end-of-life video processing equipment greatly increased the risk of service failures, Greenlight knew it was time to upgrade to more reliable and future-proof solutions.

Greenlight first achieved excellent results with the Inca IP Video Platform when modernizing their 8VSB equipment.

“We first brought in the Inca IP Video Platform to replace equipment for our off-air channels. We ended up replacing 14 pieces of equipment with one Inca chassis, a huge space and power savings,” said Linwood Tyndall, Infrastructure Engineer at Greenlight.

So, when Greenlight’s existing Cisco DCM deployments began to reach the end of their useful life, and when it became clear the company needed more flexible and efficient operations systems, Greenlight knew where to turn for an answer. “I looked to WISI once again when it came time to replace our aging Cisco DCM D9901,” said Tyndall.

An Efficient and Future-Proof Headend Solution

Greenlight carefully reviewed other alternatives but chose WISI’s headend product series to replace the older Cisco gear, along with their entire video processing and channel line-up delivery chain.  All off-air channels are now received and processed using the Inca IP Video Platform. The solution also includes transrating and transcoding functions for both locally derived and nationally sourced channels.

The Tangram Video Platform converts feeds at the edge of the network, (e.g., IP to Analog) and multiplexes signals for delivery over the company’s fiber network.  The platform is modular in architecture, meaning that as Greenlight grows, and video processing needs change over time, they can preserve their platform investments by simply changing out modules to new functionality.

Greenlight couldn’t be happier with their upgrade.

“We are pretty much using WISI through the whole system,” said Tyndall. “We looked at quite a few options for transcoding but nobody else could offer the ease of use and the advanced [user] interface that WISI provides.”

World-Class Monitoring and Operations Completes the Story

While any number of products in the marketplace might be able to process video and passthrough streams in the same manner as the WISI product line, numerous operators such as Greenlight have found that monitoring and operations considerations make WISI the hands-down choice. The Inca IP Video Platform comes with its award-winning VidiOS™ management and monitoring tools built in. The unique VidiOS™ graphical interface was designed from the ground up to ensure a user-friendly experience for reviewing video statistics. Features include inbound and outbound video thumbnails, stream sample downloads, extensive statistical analysis, and end-to-end process logging.

Greenlight found WISI’s VidiOS™ a compelling factor in their equipment upgrade considerations.

“Other vendors don’t provide the level of analytics and details that the Inca platform provides. You would usually have to use an MPEG analyzer for the details you can easily see in VidiOS™,” said Tyndall. “We found WISI’s UI to be very unique to the market.”

Greenlight is also using the All Seeing Eye (ASE) platform, which is compatible with both the Inca and Tangram product families. The ASE delivers a network-wide visual mosaic of all video streams in a headend, whether processed by WISI products or third-party equipment.

“ASE saves us a lot of time on troubleshooting and helps us identify issues quickly. It gives us the ability to proactively identify issues before the customer calls them in,” said Tyndall. “Gone are the days of referring to spreadsheets when trying to find the source of an issue in our network.”

Having deployed highly efficient, state-of-the-art, and future-proofed video processing gear from WISI, Greenlight now uses far less rack space and power than previous and utilizes unparalleled monitoring tools to streamline day-to-day operations.