Fox Sports chooses 'rugged' Juniper

Premier Media Group, a broadcaster and production company responsible for Fox Sports, has announced the completion of a new network roll-out using Juniper equipment.

Premier Media Group's chief technology officer Tony Scanlan told ZDNet Australia that the decision to use Juniper emerged from a "competitive" process that had several key metrics including reliability, manageability and value. The network company beat a range of other vendors including Cisco, which was shortlisted.

According to Scanlan the company has been quite happy with Juniper.

"The Juniper network carried our 3D broadcast in May from the MCG. We used the Juniper kit in our networks, to bring back both our HD and 3D feed. We shifted about 4 terabytes of data over the duration of the broadcast without a single packet loss or a single error. That's the kind of performance we're looking for," said Scanlan, adding that it was all managed from a single terminal.

Premier Media Group's previous system was "a bit of a mishmash", according to Scanlan.

"[For] some locations outside of the metro area we had to rely upon a satellite service, which meant that we were using MPEG2 compression, which as you know is a block-based compression system," he said.

"There was some satellite here, there was some Telstra there — so we took the decision to push out a dedicated connection in all our key remote sports venues to have a vanilla, ubiquitous platform across those locations."

While Premier Media Group's in-house team was responsible for the physical aspects of the roll-out, a local Juniper agent, ICT Networks, assisted with the installation.

"These things are flying in the back of trucks, they're out in the rain so we really need a bomb-proof solution for that — that was the main reason for the Juniper decision, it had that kind of feature set and reliability," said Scanlan.

The new network will improve the quality and speed of Premier Media Group's broadcasts.