The test and measurement industry is putting out the welcome mat for the industry to venture into LTE-Advanced, as was evident in much of the news out of Mobile World Congress this week. Not only do the vendors want to establish themselves at the forefront of testing technology that allows other LTE-A research and development to advance, but the test labs themselves want the telecom industry to know that they have cutting-edge equipment in place.
Some of the week’s highlights:
—Rohde & Schwarz and Qualcomm successfully demonstrated that Qualcomm’s Gobi chipset can maintain full protocol stack data rates for LTE Category 6 of speeds up to 300 Mbps downlink, which R&S said “[gives] mobile operators a clear path to the commercial launch of LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation.”
The set-up at MWC included the R&S CMW500 wideband radio communication tester simulating an LTE-A network; Rohde & Schwarz said that the tester is the only platform in the industry that combines RF and protocol tests with Cat6 IP throughput measurements.
Rohde & Schwarz also had its equipment selected by Cetecom for conformance and carrier acceptance testing for Release 10 features including IMS, VoLTE, RCS, E911 over IMS, and others; and likewise announced that testing lab Intertek is going to be using its testing platforms for LTE-Advanced features.
–Test house 7Layers said that it has upgraded its Anritsu ME7873L RF/RRM conformance test system with releases 8, 9, and 10 Radio Resource Management (RRM), as well as carrier aggregation (CA) test capabilities. 7Layers said that the upgrade “significantly expands” its test portfolio. Anritsu offers validated test cases across eight band combinations for CA, and the test system recently achieved the first test platform approval criteria (TPAC) for LTE-A carrier aggregation from the Global Certification Forum.
—Agilent Technologies, which has been working with China Mobile on a cloud-based Radio Access Network that the two companies showcased at MWC, is supporting LTE Release 11 RF conformance testing for FDD and TDD in its latest X-Series measurement software release.
–In addition this week, Aeroflex Ltd. has said that it is “actively working on developing technologies towards potential Fifth Generation (5G) wireless systems,” according to a company statement. Aeroflex is a founding partner in 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC)  program in the United Kingdom. The company’s involvement includes “assuring the testability” of the wireless systems of the future, which are expected to be highly complex, dense and intelligent.
Aeroflex also launched a new base station RF tester that it says supports all of the mainstream cellular and non-cellular wireless standards, including LTE/LTE-Advanced and Wi-Fi. The tester can be used for RF design verification and production testing on small cells — another hot topic of the week at MWC.
—AT4 Wireless Spain has been authorized by CTIA to conduct its RF performance over-the-air testing according to its latest test plan. This updates the company’s testing services for 2G and 3G with CTIA’s test plan version 3.2.2.
–Make sure you check out our videos from MWC — plenty of them are related to test and measurement. We had JDSU talking about its new analytics engine and discussing small cell planning and deployment;
We talked to Azimuth Systems about their role in supporting LTE deployments:
There are dozens more videos up, so take a look at our Mobile World Congress 2014 playlist on YouTube.
— We also have testing demos up from the National Association of Tower Erectors show this week, including Anritsu updates to its PIM Master, Agilent giving details on Field Fox, and a very small microwave spectrum analyzer from SAF Tehnika.
In this clip, Eduardo Inzunza, who does business development for JDSU’s wireless business unit and spoke at the NATE Unite 2014 show, tells us about trends.
