Spirent Evolves Wireless Testing, New VoLTE, RCS solutions

Las Vegas, Nevada – Testing solutions aren’t typically very exciting, but Spirent Communications managed to make this morning at CTIA quite interesting with a pair of announcements introducing a new testing architecture and new device-to-device VoLTE and RCS test solutions.

Spirent Elevate Test Framework is a distributed network of resources for testing wireless and machine-to-machine (M2M) devices and services. Instead of being an expensive, hardware dependent testing model, Spirent Elevate separates hardware from software, using virtualization and organizing test elements and resources into an open architecture, so resources can be distributed with shareable test results for collaboration across teams.

Three different problems in network testing have developed, said Saul Einbinder, Spirent’s VP for Venture Development. First, testing equipment continued to be expensive and complex while everything else in the world got cheaper.  When building new networks, buying testing equipment was pushed back to late in the deployment cycle – not quite the time when you want to find out there are problems in the network.

Voice over LTE (VoLTE) comes with new testing challenges, with interoperability issues not becoming apparent in the lab but only revealed when handsets actually go out in the field and start making calls.  The need for VoLTE to negotiate an IP session with another device before has revealed that certain phones run into issues talking to each other on a real-world LTE network, and need to be tweaked before they can go into use on a production network.

Finally, there are a lot more players in the wireless space now that aren’t wireless expects. Applications developers new to the arena are struggling with how to conduct wireless testing.

Elevate opens up wireless testing through a combination of hardware, software and virtualization. By use of a cloud and licensing, an organization can now share testing processes across labs, rather than having to have a dedicated box stuck at one location due to cost and functions locked into a specific box. Measurement results in the lab can be shared across global development teams.

Spirent’s new VoLTE/RCS test services solution is built on Elevate, integrating the new Wireless Test Station, ProLab IMS Suite and User Experience Analytics.  The new set emulates a wide range of real-world network conditions for testing of voice and video over LTE devices.   Device-to-device services such as VoLTE require devices to communicate directly to each other to establish basic call functionality.

The new VoLTE/RCS test solution enables the exposure of even complex interoperability issues in the lab.  Performance issues can be identified earlier and multiple devices can be tested simultaneously.

Spirent isn’t the only network testing news out this week.  Ixia announced its IxLoad test solution now runs as a virtualized system to help mobile operators assess the success of NFV deployments.