With Mobile World Congress serving as a window into the industry’s areas of interest in 2015 and beyond, a slew of MWC test news serves to illustrate where test and measurement companies are anticipating interest from OEMs and operators.
— Keysight Technologies focused on its research work with China Mobile on 5G, in addition to a ream of product announcements. The company has new software to support early 5G exploration.
Keysight’s product news included frequency-extension upgrades for its MXE EMI receiver, allowing existing instruments to have their maximum frequency expanded to 8.4, 26.5 or 44 GHz via a return to a Keysight service center. The company started to offer frequency extension as a post-purchase upgrade on some of its equipment earlier this year.
On the sales side, Keysight is also going back to across-the-board direct sales of its equipment in North America, in addition to its standing relationship with Electro Rent for equipment rentals; Electro Rent had been handling direct sales for specific domestic accounts. Dave Alpin, complementary channel manager for Keysight in the Americas, said that the move “is the result of a shift in channel strategy for high-performance products in the U.S. and Canada.”
The company boosted its B1505A Power Device Analyzer/Curve Tracer and says it is now “the industry’s only solution able to characterize all key parameters of on-wafer and packaged devices for modern semiconductor power device development.”
I’m pretty sure at this point that I could write an entire piece each week on Keysight’s product announcements — they’ve really stepped things up in the wake of their spin-off. If you want the full list of their product announcements this week, check them out here. But they aren’t the only ones with MWC test news, so on to:
— Anritsu announced some customer wins this week that point to the continued advance of testing for LTE-A features: Underwriters Laboratories is going to be relying on its equipment as it becomes the first commercial, independent provider of conformance testing for three-component-carrier carrier aggregation. Anritsu and UL have a long-standing relationship, and according to the two companies, UL’s use of Anritsu’s ME7873LA platform will support “maximum coverage of newly validated test cases across the highest number of bands.” In addition, AT4 Wireless will be using Anritsu equipment to expand AT4’s LTE-A conformance and carrier acceptance testing, including support for both FDD and TDD LTE, plus carrier aggregation, IMS and VoLTE.
Anritsu also launched a new line of Shockwave one-port USB vector network analyzers this week for testing cables, antennas and other passive RF devices, and demonstrated its work in the testing the connected car at MWC this week.
The company recently unveiled a turnkey offering for small cell manufacturing testing in partnership with Cavium, which leverages Anritsu’s MT8870A Universal Test Set and supports testing for cellular, the Wi-Fi 802.11ac standard, Bluetooth, ZigBee and location-based services.
— Speaking of the connected car, Azimuth Systems is going to be collaborating with Qosmotec on developing a car-to-car test solution that relies on Qosmotec’s signal strength emulator with Azimuth’s channel emulation capabilities to provide C2C interoperability testing in the lab.
— Spirent announced new capabilities in the realm of Wi-Fi and cellular interactions, including Wi-Fi data offload and Voice over Wi-Fi, which is a feature that has garnered quite a bit of attention lately. Spirent’s Landslide product now supports testing of VoWiFi handovers, with insight into what’s happening in the access point as well as the offload gateway that bridges to the mobile packet core.
Meanwhile, Spirent’s device intelligence unit, Tweakker, was able to expand its access-point name set-up platform to cover Belgium in just seven days, the company said, to support MVNO customer Join Experience.
— Anite slipped in an acquisition this week, announcing that it will purchase Munich, Germany-based SetCom Wireless for about $2.87 million. SetCom has a multi-Radio Access Technology testing platform and focuses on wireless device application testing. Its flagship offering, S-Core, is a test solution for Wi-Fi offload, IMS and RCS-based services. Anite expects the transaction to be complete by the beginning of April.
— Some interesting new numbers recently came out from several companies, so if you missed these stories, check them out: Newfield Wireless followed up on its tracking of the impact of the newest, VoLTE-capable iPhone models on 3G calling, JDSU gave some detailed insight into tying network hot spots together with geolocation data, and J.D. Power released its most recent survey of customer experience in regard to network quality (spoiler: Verizon Wireless gets the best ratings across the country).
— Rohde & Schwarz had a busy week as well. It is putting emphasis on LTE broadcast, or eMBMS. It launched a simpler test solution for eMBMS, relying on its CMW500 wideband radio tester and its CMW cards, that cuts out an external BMSC server, requires no programming knowledge and that the company says is easier to configure in a real-world mobile network.
R&S said the new test cases cover all signaling procedures and user experience tests for LTE multicasting and that its offering is the only one currently on the market that supports “all conventional roaming, mobility and interoperability tests with … WCDMA, GSM, WLAN/Wi-Fi and Release 10 carrier aggregation.” allows the configuration of up to two MBMS single-frequency networks (each consisting of 1-2 LTE cells). The addition also expands eMBMS video performance measurement capabilities to Rohde’s CMW-PQA test system — which, by the way, also saw its capabilities for mobile app behavior testing expanded through a software option.
R&S also has implemented 2 GHz bandwidth analysis in its FSW high-end signal and spectrum analyzer (via a hardware option FSW-B2000), to support very wideband signal analysis for the new 802.11ad Wi-Fi standard, radar chirp signals and expectations for 5G. The FSW downconverts the large-bandwidth signal into an intermediate frequency, which then gets wideband digitized by an R&S RTO oscilloscope.
The company also announced a collaboration with CCI for a comprehensive cellular site testing solution, including passive intermodulation; and a customer win with Intertek, which will be upgrading its equipment in the testing for, among others, E-911 over IMS protocol; eMBMS RF, performance, video performance and protocol; LTE CA RF performance; and protocol testing for IMS/VoLTE and RCS as well as Wi-Fi offloading.
