UniFi HyppTV Review

In my last blog post, I’ve written about my UniFi IPTV setup. In this post, I thought I share my brief experience with the UniFi IPTV service itself — namely, HyppTV.

Channels

The HyppTV IPTV service runs on its own dedicated network. For IPTV, TM has allotted 8Mbps of bandwidth which is good enough for HD streaming and more than enough for SD streaming.

There are currently 22 channels with more channels to come by the end of the year. Out of these channels, only 2 channels are in HD.

Channels are classified into three — Live TV, Video On Demand (VOD) and inter@ctive.

Live TV includes local and international broadcast channels. Local channels include free-to-air channels like TV1, TV2, TV3, NTV7, 8TV, TV9, etc. Some of the international channels include Australia Network, BBC Lifestyle, BBC Knowledge, Fashion TV HD, LUXE.TV HD, Star Chinese Channel, etc. Some of these channels are Premium channels.

Come September 2010, for VIP5 and VIP10 customers, a separate subscription will be required for Premium channels. For VIP20 customers, the Premium channels will be part of the package.

In VOD or pay-per-view if you like, there’s a selection of Hollywood, Malay, Chinese as well as Bollywood titles.

Movies typically have a validity of 24 hours. Within that 24 hours you can watch the movie as many number of times as you like.

One of the highlights in the VOD offering is the Hollywood Premiere Series; this selection contains the latest TV series — available 24 hours after the US release.

For TV series, validity is typically 30 days or longer.

For some titles, free previews or trailers are available on demand. Purchasing a VOD title is easy; just select the title from the on-screen VOD catalog (see above) and enter a PIN. During this preview period, TM is giving out free trial tokens.

Once purchased, the title is ready to be watched immediately or anytime within the validity period.

For VOD, playback control is available i.e. pause, fast-forward, reverse and bookmarking.

There’s even an option to rate a title. The average rating for a title is displayed in the on-screen VOD catalog.

inter@ctive channels include flight info, Malaysian history, Malaysian football and games (see below). I understand more interactive services will be added on later. Can we expect a YouTube channel? That would be nice isn’t it?

IPTV Video Quality

In general, the colors from IPTV seem more vivid compared to the colors from Astro — at least on an SDTV. HD channels will still play on an SDTV but the aspect ratio need to be manually adjusted.

Though UniFi’s IPTV service is not affected by the rain as in Astro, occasionally, there’ll be those nasty picture artifacts similar to Astro. Nevertheless, those artifacts often disappear fast enough before becoming annoying. Note that I’m using HomePlugs for my IPTV setup. A wired network connection to the IPTV may give better experience.

Switching between channels is almost instantaneous but I’ve observed some stuttering in the first few seconds after a channel switch — possibly due to buffering?

There’s also Picture-in-Picture (PIP) (see below).

Concerns

To view IPTV on the television set, all equipment necessary to support IPTV like the fiber broadband termination unit, residential gateway and set-top box (STB) must be turned on. If HomePlugs are used in an IPTV setup, that must be switched on too. So, as you can see, should any of the equipment fail, IPTV won’t work!

To add to the concern, the residential gateway (DLink DIR-615) provided by TM has been reported to be very fragile; it tends to get fried.

I’ve placed the gateway unit on a heat sink and hooked it to a surge-protected electrical socket as one of the measures to add more robustness to the whole setup.

Is HyppTV another Astro?

Well, one of the inevitable questions is whether TM’s new IPTV service is a worthy replacement of Astro.

At least for now, I don’t think so. Content is a bit limited at the moment though there are channel overlaps. However, things might change in the future!

Technorati tags: tm, unifi, hsbb, broadband, iptv, hypptv

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My UniFi IPTV Setup

It’s about 3 weeks since I’ve got my UniFi high-speed broadband service deployed. In my previous posts, I’ve written about my UniFi installation experience and some speed tests that I’ve done.

This time around, I’m going to share my experience on one of the UniFi service triple-play component, namely the HyppTV IPTV service.

Getting IPTV Up and Running

As part of the UniFi VIP5 offering, an IPTV set-top box (STB) is provided free by TM (see below). The STB connects to the TV via a regular set of A/V cables. An HDMI cable is also provided but we’ve only got a Standard-Definition TV (SDTV).

This STB is connected to the residential gateway which in turn is connected to the fiber broadband termination unit. The IPTV stream runs on a separate LAN (a Virtual LAN or VLAN) at an allocated bandwidth of 8Mbps. On the TM DLink DIR-615 residential gateway, the VLAN for IPTV connects to one of the ports (i.e. port 4).

In my home setup, the broadband termination unit and the residential gateway are placed in an area where the internal CAT5 wiring from the bedrooms terminate. This area is near the center of the house. The CAT5 wiring was done several years ago.

However, there’s no permanent wired network connection leading up to the living room where the TV and STB are located.

During installation day, I loaned the TM technicians a loose CAT5 cable for setting up and testing the IPTV service. Testing went well but I still need a permanent network connection for the IPTV.

Why not go wireless? For one, it’s simply not reliable for IPTV streaming. Wired connection seems to be the way to go but then I’ll need to pull a cable up the ceiling. Having wires snaking around wouldn’t play well with the home aesthetics either — especially the living room.

HomePlugs to the Rescue!

At the end, I settled for a pair of Aztech HL110E 200Mbps AV HomePlugs. Each unit comes with a yellow 2-meter CAT5 patch cable (see below). It’s pricey but at least there’s no need to drill holes through the ceiling. Essentially, the HomePlug technology utilizes the wall electrical wiring to transmit network data. Pretty smart eh?

200Mbps sounds like an overkill for a max 8Mbps video stream. Operational speed actually depends on many external factors. In the worst case, both HomePlugs won’t even detect each other.

It’s recommended that a HomePlug be plugged directly to the wall socket for best signal quality but I didn’t have that luxury. There are simply not enough wall sockets in the house. I had no choice but to plug each of HomePlugs to a power strip on both sides (network hub area and living room).

Here’s my exact setup:

1. Network hub area:

Residential gateway  > HomePlug > Surge-protected power strip > Lightning isolator > Wall socket

2. Living room area:

STB > HomePlug > Power strip > Lightning isolator > Wall socket

Despite getting only a red LED status (green = best, amber = good, red = fair, none = failed) on the HomePlugs, IPTV streaming still works although the setup wasn’t very ideal as you can see.

Note that I didn’t get it working the first time; one old power strip caused a failed pairing but a newer one works. So, a little patience and experimentation paid off.

Now that everything works, I’ll follow up with a detailed review of the TM UniFi HyppTV service next. Stay tuned!

Technorati tags: tm, unifi, hsbb, broadband, iptv, hypptv, aztech, homeplugs

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UniFi Speed Tests

Having been using TM’s UniFi high-speed broadband service for slightly over two weeks now, I’m quite pleased with the service. It’s been surprisingly stable for me.

Internet Speed Test Results

I’m currently on the VIP5 package (over FTTH) i.e. 5Mbps download and upload. In my previous post, I had written about my UniFi installation experience.

Here are the speed test results from Speedtest.net:

 

 

As you can see from the above, download speeds were generally within the package speed limit.

I believe some of the upload figures from Speedtest.net were slightly inflated.

It appeared that there was some kind of speed throttling going on here as I saw the upload speed meter going down in sudden decrements at certain intervals as the upload test progressed. Had the upload test been longer, I would think it would have stabilized at around 5Mbps.

I have seen various speed meter movement behaviors over the past two weeks which lead me to think that TM was probably experimenting with various traffic flow or routing configurations?

In fact, in the initial days after I got my UniFi service deployed, I had seen insane speeds from Speedtest.net — even up to 50Mbps; but that has changed in the recent days.

Note that for some servers around the world, I got lousy speeds and slow ping times (see below).

My guess: This could be caused by a slow server or slow path to the server or both.

Ping Performance

Pinging to Google’s public DNS (8.8.8.8) averaged 4ms. I also got the same results pinging to a local web server.That’s pretty fast. On Streamyx, I normally get about 11ms.

Foreign server ping times were more or less the same, if not, just slightly better over ping times on Streamyx (typically >200ms for US servers). This is understandable since foreign traffic for both UniFi and Streamyx is probably routed over the same international backbones. The ping time advantage came mainly from the local side.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more UniFi reviews!

Technorati tags: tm, unifi, hsbb, broadband, ftth, speedtest

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The UniFi Installation Experience

In my post on HSBB last year, I wrote about the arrival of FTTH (Fiber-to-the-Home) in my area of residence.

Well, I finally made the move of switching away from Streamyx broadband for the newly-introduced UniFi high-speed broadband (HSBB) service. In particular, I signed up for the VIP5 package which is a triple-play service i.e. 5Mbps Internet, IPTV and VoIP.

In this post, I thought I share my experience on the UniFi installation process.

Installation

It was a Tuesday morning at 10am on July 6, a crew of four installers from TM came with two reels of cables (see below) and big bags containing equipment.

After the normal introductions, I lead the crew to the back of the house where the nearest pole with the fiber distribution box is located. I also took them to the rooftop.

I told them where I wanted the broadband termination unit, residential gateway, phone and IPTV set-up-box (STB) were to be placed.

After a quick survey, the crew leader briefed me on how the installation was going to take place.

In no time, they started working — first tackling the aerial fiber distribution box on the pole. At the same time, the crew made a hook on the side of a concrete structure on the rooftop (see below).

That hook was to hold the black fiber cable pulled from the pole. The black cable ran along the side of the concrete structure leading to another fiber box which was affixed to the concrete wall (see below).

From this box, a thin white fiber cable was pulled to a nearby window. The cable was so thin that only a small gap at the bottom part of the window was sufficient for the cable to gain entry into the house (see below).

Though not the most elegant way of bringing the cable in, at least there was no need to drill a hole through the wall as in some other installations.

Inside the house, this white cable ran straight down to another fiber box (see below). For this cable-run, the crew housed the cable in a conduit.

It was about 11:15am (after about an hour plus of outdoor work), all crew members gathered indoors and started hooking up and configuring the equipments (see below from left to right: DECT phone, broadband termination unit, residential gateway). They brought their own laptop for configuration and testing.

Since the household TV set is in the living room (front part of the house), I wanted the IPTV STB (see below) there. I provided them with a long CAT5 cable to connect the STB with the residential gateway for temporary testing purposes.

All these configuration and testing took about half-an-hour.

I was then given a sheet of paper containing several access passwords for different services.

Happy that everything was working, I did the sign-off and the crew left in their van at about 12pm.

So, the complete installation only took them 2 hours — a big contrast from the full day installation that I was initially told.

By the way, hats off to the TM installers. They were an efficient bunch and I appreciate their professionalism. I don’t normally give such a compliment after having had a bad experience with my Streamyx implementation in the past.

Terminating Old Phone Service and Streamyx

After doing some testing on my own and satisfied with the outcome, I went to TMPoint Bangsar to terminate the old phone service and my Streamyx broadband service just before their counter closing at about 5:30pm. I returned their old phone to them to avoid a penalty.

So, there you have it! I hope to share about my experience with the UniFi service itself in the near future.

Technorati tags: tm, unifi, hsbb, broadband, ftth

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