Trilithic is fast out of the starting gate for 2012, as officials of the Indianapolis-based firm are announcing its new 860 DSPi Field Analyzer, which they describe as “a portable instrument platform that can be upgraded with features to assist plant technicians in performing critical transmission and signal quality tests for maintaining analog, digital, HSD, and VoIP services.”

Hey, they know that the escalating costs of plant maintenance are a challenge for you, and maintaining broadband networks is a big, big part of your network’s total cost of ownership. You need to find such network problems as RF noise, jitter, packet loss, among others, quickly and efficiently. What they’re offering is a tool to help improve your troubleshooting speed, and give you a hand controlling the escalating costs of plant maintenance.

And ever better, since new features and services can be downloaded free from the company’s site, company officials expect the analyzer to be “industry standard” for data communication tools, as they point to its “long life cycles” and “economical lifetime ownership cost.”

Company officials say that while the 860 DSPi was designed to address the needs of technicians and engineers looking for versatile measurement capabilities, it also integrates with Trilithic’s TDM test data management server package so users can configure and manage analyzer inventory, store measurement data, generate reports and create custom database queries.

The idea is to shorten trouble calls. And the 860 DSPi Field Analyzer uses flexible, digital signal processing technology so it can be pretty easily upgraded with features, or applications in the field, “by simply downloading firmware and without changing meters,” company officials say.

Trilithic officials tout its capacity for measuring latency, jitter, packet loss, and other VoIP parameters in seconds, as well as the fact that the average BER function provides test data up to 10 times faster than other analyzers, so problem sources can be identified faster.

It also has a CableLabs (News - Alert)-certified DOCSIS 3.0 modem, it enables a full complement of DOCSIS 3.0 tests, including individual downstream receive levels and upstream transmit levels, among many others. It can analyze VoIP performance from end-to-end and from the subscriber to the CMTS, and view in-channel spectrum characteristics with the Error Vector Spectrum (News - Alert) mode.