QOD Gateway is one of only 5 products in the entire industry to receive a 4.5 or 5 rating in BGR's Diamond Technology Reviews 2007
Diamond Technology Reviews '07 New Solutions That Demand Attention
Broadband Gear Report for June 21, 2007
Important note: Broadband Gear Report invited vendors to submit products for review that had been released or upgraded since June 30, 2006. We randomly assigned each entry to three of the five judges (listed below). Judges based scores/com- ments on written material provided by vendors, as well as their own experience with or knowledge of the specific technologies.
BGR's staff played no role in the judging of the submitted products. Review panelists were informed that scores/com- ments would remain anonymous. Only products receiving 3 Diamonds or above are included in this article. Welcome to Broadband Gear Report's Third Annual Diamond Technology Reviews ("the Diamonds"). Our judging panel of top engineering execs has reviewed some of the hottest new products for cable networks, and they've offered frank opinions about what they think is really worth the industry's while. The judging panel included:
Tom Gorman, VP Operations Engineering, Charter
Wayne Hall, VP of Engineering, Comcast
Vicki Marts, Director of Video Engineering, Cox
Dermot O'Carroll, Senior VP, Network Engineering and Operations, Rogers
Gene White, VP of Engineering, Bright House
Judges used the following scale to determine Diamonds scores:
- 0-1 Useful product, yet commodity
- 2-3 Solid product with viable attributes that set it apart
- 4 Excellent product with technical features and performance that provide clear and substantial benefits
- 5 Superb product that sets new standard for performance and provides groundbreaking and new technical milestones
We averaged each product's score, and what follows are the technologies that BGR's judges gave three Diamonds or above. Note that products are grouped by scores (with the highest Diamond ranking first), and then in alphabetical order.
Imagine QOD Gateway: 4.5 Diamonds
Imagine Communications reports that its QOD Gateway offers ops the ability to deliver advanced video services with vari- able bit rate and statistical multiplexing, thereby enabling up to 50 percent more streams per QAM and better video quality. Imagine goes on to says that its technology allows ops to reduce their edge QAM expenditures by 33 percent and save up to 25 percent in power consumption and rack space savings. It also preserves 6 MHz channel spectrum for the upcoming HDTV bandwidth explosion.
"Imagine's QOD Gateway uses its compression algorithms to get 13,000 2 Mbps SD streams or 3,000 12 Mbps HD streams through a 5 RU chassis. This appears to reach the 18 stream SD or 3 stream HD throughput per QAM, which isn't too shabby with MPEG-2 encoding," a Diamonds judge says.