Ixia continues to deal with the fallout of its former CEO falsifiying his credentials. The company is going over its recent financials with a fine-toothed comb — although it says it has so far found no impact on its financial statements. Victor Alston resigned in late October after years of claiming to have computer science degrees from Stanford University (he attended Stanford, but did not have degrees in those areas) and lying about his age and early work history. The SEC filing for the quarter ended Sept. 30 will be delayed as Ixia scrutinizes its records, and that puts the company out of compliance with NASDAQ’s listing requirements.
Ixia’s audit committee is “conducting an email review and performing additional procedures to ensure the accuracy of its financial information and appropriateness of its financial reporting. These procedures need to be completed prior to the filing,” Ixia said in a statement.
Now Ixia has been put on notice that it has until Jan. 18 to submit a plan to regain NASDAQ listing compliance; Ixia said it intends to do so within the specified 60-day time limit.
— Spirent’s Anil Khitolia chatted with RCR this week about the significance of its equipment being chosen by test lab Intertek for device testing in preparation for the rollout of Voice over LTE. Intertek said it is one of the first commercial labs ready to test VoLTE and IMS.
“Carriers are trying to deploy VoLTE services by the end of this year and early next year,” said Khitolia, senior product manager for Spirent. “It is very important to make sure the quality of the VoLTE and RCS services, especially the VoLTE, is at parity or better than 3G used to offer.” Operators, he said, are interested in HD voice quality.
However, he noted, “it’s a challenge to go from circuit-switched to packet-switched calls. … A lot of things can happen to the IP packets which never used to happen on the circuit-switched side.”
Voice packets are intermingled with other data traffic and need to be prioritized on lower layers of the network; carriers must also make sure that their IMS networks can handle the increased amount of data traffic seamlessly, Khitolia said. He also noted that while all-IP networks are supposed to make roaming and interworking simpler, there are questions of interoperability among VoLTE clients that must be tested.
Khitolia said that this year is one that will be a major turning point in the transformation from circuit-switched networks to all-IP.
“I do see 2014 as an inflection point in the industry, where things will take off,” he said.
— JDSU has introduced the industry’s first portable, cloud-enabled cable and antenna analyzer that tests both RF coaxial and fiber cables, a task that is now frequently needed as LTE has required the addition of fiber at the cell site for backhaul. JDSU’s CellAdvisor JD720S is a portable unit that can perform all traditional RF cell-site tests, including inspects before pieces are connected; as well as RF analysis and cloud-enabled management and analysis.
— Anite said it has boosted the network emulation capabilities of its Propsim Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) testing toolset for more realistic testing of tactical communications equipment. Testing of such tactical radio equipment in military bands involves multiple independent and time-varying links between radios, Anite noted, and the radio links are tested in dynamic channel conditions that include path loss, multi-path, Doppler and propagation delay. Anite said its Propsim MANET toolset allows the emulation of any network topology in a lab, speeding up testing and providing a more cost-efficient way to verify performance.
— Tektronix has expanded the spectrum analyzer performance of its MDO4000B series of mixed domain oscilloscopes, and when used with its SignalVu-PC, offer what it says is the industry’s widest bandwidth vector signal analysis capability in support of testing for Wi-Fi standards 802.11a/b/g/n/p/ac.
The oscilloscopes have an integrated spectrum analyzer that can capture analog, digital and RF signals, and Tektronix says the systems’ popularity had been driven in large part by increasing integration of wireless technologies including Wi-Fi, Zigbee and RFID — so more engineers are faced with the issue of debugging a device with integrated RF.
“Incorporating WLAN into designs introduces a whole new level of complexity that can be challenging to debug on a system level without the right tools,” said Fanny Mlinarsky, president and CTO of octoScope, a provider of wireless test solutions and services. “The MDO4000B with SignalVu-PC delivers the right capabilities at the right price point to enable embedded and WLAN module designers to rapidly debug systems without a steep learning curve.”
