Last week Comcast revealed plans to hire some 3,000 new employees, mostly field techs and customer service reps. By adding to its army, the MSO hopes to ramp up installations and support for its bundle of voice, data, and video services.

But guess what? These soldiers need tools to simplify their work in the trenches. Selling the triple-play means that MSOs can face triple headaches when trying to deliver a reliable service bundle.

Enter Minacom and Sunrise Telecom. The companies are teaming up to deliver an integrated test, measurement, and monitoring solution for MSOs.

For its part, Minacom supplies network-based service quality test automation solutions. Sunrise sells those nifty handheld test and measurement units for telcos and cable operators.

Through the deal, the companies will link Minacom's DirectQuality R7 platform with Sunrise's handheld meters running FTTx, DSL, and cable test sets.

The idea is to provide speedy end-to-end service validation, testing the network and applications from the network into the home, and then at the customer premises itself. This is particularly helpful for finicky digital voice and video applications where delay and jitter anomalies make the difference between five nines and deep-sixing the service.

-- Michael Harris, Chief Analyst, Cable Digital News