The Optical Fiber Communications Conference this week was a chance for test and measurement companies to share their wares related to testing the wired portions of communications networks.
Anritsu‘s equipment was used in demos by Mindspeed Technologies, Sumitomo Electric Industries, Kotura, and Semtech Corp.
Anritsu also revised upward its projections for its operating results for its fiscal year, which ends March 31. The company said that the change was due to foreign currency changes and examining deferred tax gains, not changes in market conditions.
Agilent Technologies introduced what it claims is the industry’s first software for decoding MIPI Radio Frequency Front-End protocol packets on oscilloscopes. The protocol decoder provides design and validation engineers with a fast, easy way to validate and debug their RFFE interfaces.
RFFE offers a common method for controlling RF front-end devices, like power amplifiers, sensors and antenna tuners.
Rohde & Schwarz gave additional details of one particular demo at Mobile World Congress: it was the world’s first set of RF conformance test cases for downlink carrier aggregation, a key LTE-Advanced feature for spectral efficiency that operators have said they are eager to implement in their networks. The demo involved the 1.7/2.1 GHz and 700 MHz bands that AT&T will be using, according to Rohde & Schwarz.
Now the company has both this R&S TS 8980 RF test system for downlink carrier aggregation, plus its carrier aggregation test cases for protocol testing.
A new report from Heavy Reading says that testing is critical to the new LTE networks.
“The phenomenal and continuing growth in mobile data consumption, driven largely by the exploding market of new smartphones, tablets, readers and other wireless devices, is stressing wireless networks like never before,” says Denise Culver, research analyst with Heavy Reading Insider and author of the report. “Elements within the network are now expected to handle increasingly complex procedures at performance levels unheard of just a few years ago.”
Culver said that a network’s success is only as good as how it acts with live subscribers onboard, and this reality is putting increased attention on LTE testing, measurement and service assurance.
“As LTE testing and measurement continues to prove out networks, leading operators will start providing tighter SLAs to enterprise customers over LTE networks,” she said. “Today’s subscribers generate more data than ever, and the key for operators to meet increasingly high expectations will be to extract relevant, actionable and immediate insights from this data that they can use to ensure seamless, high-quality end-user experiences and engage with subscribers in the ways they prefer.”
