New solutions launched this week take test company Spirent Communications from its traditional focus on simulation in the lab into monitoring and insights into live networks, as well as customer experience analytics.
Spirent is taking its flagship Landslide product, which is used in the lab to simulate real-world end points, traffic and network behavior, and has adapted it to create virtual user equipment that can be established at any point in a live network and mimic user behavior to give real-time insight into network issues and end user experience. It launched two offerings this week in that vein. Landslide Edge is designed to simulate up to 50 users at the network edge, and Landslide Core can simulate up to 10,000 users.
Ross Cassan, director of product marketing for Spirent, said that outages are still a costly issue for operators and they want to see more predictive solutions for network monitoring, to warn them when conditions are starting to deteriorate but have not yet had significant impacts on customers. By simulating an end user device at different points in the network, Cassan said, operators can get a view on when latency starts to rise and connection times start to lag — as well as the ability to proactively test things like roaming capabilities with partners by creating virtual end user devices that make roaming calls. The ability to simulate large numbers of users also means that when a network element is being fixed during a maintenance window — often in the middle of the night — the fix can be tested at significant scale rather than just waiting to see how well it performs at the next busy network time, Cassan said.
The new InTouch Customer and Network Analytics solution is aimed at ensuring a good customer experience as well as troubleshooting, and it supports 2G, 3G and LTE as well as Voice over LTE and “Internet of Things” applications, according to Spirent.
Watch the interview and demo of Landslide Core and Edge below:
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[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdzSHh0n4oc[/embedyt]
