Hive Insights Gives Actionable Data on Network Readiness for Live Streaming

Swisscom is the largest telecommunications provider in Switzerland with 20,000 employees in more than 30 locations globally, including Switzerland, Italy, Silicon Valley and Shanghai. Switzerland has the highest broadband density in the world, and in this market, Swisscom has more than a 50% share of the telecommunications market.

To serve their internal and external communication needs, Swisscom has extensive infrastructure and has provisioned very high bandwidth between their offices. For internal communication and townhall events, Swisscom uses Microsoft Office 365 and Skype Meeting Broadcast to communicate with their employees (see Hive for Microsoft integrations). Even though their vast internal network can handle a very high volume of concurrent live video streams, sometimes video traffic has an impact on other TCP core traffic. Also, on occasion connectivity to remote offices isn’t always the best which results in buffering and poor video quality for some users during live video broadcasts.

Swisscom wanted to be able to have employees watch live video on their devices without impacting the performance of their corporate network. One option, that was quickly dismissed, was to provision additional bandwidth throughout their enterprise network.  According to Frank Schefter, Product Manager at Swisscom, this approach just doesn’t make sense. “To provision enough bandwidth to accommodate the bandwidth peaks we hit during live video broadcasts once or twice a month just doesn’t make economic sense,” said Frank.

Partly as a precautionary measure, but also for the vast analytics capabilities, Swisscom decided to implement the Hive Streaming service to provide more efficient distribution of video streams. With the Hive solution, only one stream needs to be delivered to each subnet, allowing everyone to view that one stream. It’s an extremely bandwidth efficient solution that often delivers well over 90% bandwidth savings. By “savings” we mean video content that was delivered by Hive peering, rather than pulled from the source in typical unicast fashion.

Also appealing to Swisscom was the vast analytics capabilities provided by Hive Insights reporting. Hive Insights gives Swisscom easy to comprehend and actionable reports on live event performance, quality of experience, and network load during a Town Hall event.

Swisscom also utilized Hive Silent Testing to analyze potential bottlenecks before a real event takes place. This helps tremendously to plan for resources, fix potential problems with networks or devices, and confirm QoE to all participants without having to involve them in the test.

Swisscom has never been able to follow up on their internal video strategy with metrics such as end-user quality of experience, nor have we been able to be proactive in making sure all employees will receive good video QoE on their devices prior to a live broadcast. With the Hive Streaming solution implemented, Swisscom is able to conduct live video broadcasts with confidence.

Frank Schefter, Product Manager – Swisscom Event & Media Solutions

Swisscom can now stream live video without impacting their network and without having to deploy more expensive bandwidth. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to info@hivestreaming.com if you are interested in how Hive can solve your video challenges.