In its second deal in two weeks, test company EXFO said that it has signed an agreement to purchase French optical test equipment supplier Yenista Optics, which serves the high-end lab and manufacturing markets.
Details of the acquisition were not disclosed, although EXFO said it will be subject to a number of conditions prior to closing. Yenista produces equipment including benchtop optical spectrum analyzers, tunable filters and lasers, and systems for passive optical component test. Yenista had revenues of more than 5 million Euros in 2016 and was profitable, according to EXFO, which called the company “highly complementary to EXFO’s optical test portfolio, which largely consists of portable test equipment for the network service provider market.”
“Yenista Optics has built an impressive product portfolio over the years for the high-end laboratory and manufacturing markets,” said Germain Lamonde, executive chairman of EXFO’s board of directors, in a statement. “This transaction, if completed, would allow EXFO to leverage Yenista’s best-in-class technology across its global sales channels to expand market share.”
Last week, EXFO picked up a major stake in network performance analytics company Astellia and said that it intends to make an offer on all the outstanding shares of the company in a “friendly” takeover. In the meantime, EXFO also this week launched a new optical spectrum analyzer that it says enables comprehensive testing of all OSA tests while networks stay live and in-service. Service providers have typically had to shut down networks or channels to conduct optical signal-to-noise radio of 100G, 200G or 400G signals, the company said, but the new tester provides in-service testing of OSNR as well as O-band pluggables and L-band transceivers, among other features, according to the company.
In other test news:
-The Global Certification Forum has a new internet of things working group, focusing on testing and certification for various IoT devices that make use of mobile connectivity. The IoT Agreement Group (a happy name!) aims to help promote interoperability among IoT standards and “how IoT device certification needs to integrate with application-layer standards from organizations such as OMA and oneM2M,” GCF said. GCF said that the IAG will “support the global roll-out of applications initially based on 3GPP Mobile IoT standards including NB-IoT and LTE Cat-M1. This will be expanded to capture many flavors of IoT standards.”
–Rohde & Schwarz’s equipment will be used to support a ZTE device demo that achieves 1 Gbps speeds at next week’s Mobile World Congress Americas event. The device relies on carrier aggregation, 256 QAM modulation and 4×4 multiple-input-multiple-output to achieve gigabit LTE speeds, and validation of the downlink speeds is provided by R&S’s CMWflexx offering.
–Keysight Technologies has a new 64 Gbaud bit error rate tester aimed at simplifying testing for 400G data center links. Keysight is also talking up its new cloud reporting service for Nemo-based products from its 2015 acquisition of Anite, to streamline data collection and reporting from Nemo test devices.
Keysight announced a collaboration this week with software-defined spectrum analysis company ThinkRF, which utilizes Keysight’s 89600 vector signal analyzer software and ThinkRF’s R550 real-time spectrum analyzer. Keysight said that ThinkRF is the first third-party vendor to directly interface its hardware with that particular software, which was introduced in 2000 — and that the collaboration will mean that a wider range of developers can now utilize the software.
– inUAVi, which provides measurement and sensor equipment for drones, launched a radio frequency monitor for unmanned aerial vehicles this week. Full story here.
-Service provider Ålcom is using Polystar’s Odin solution for ensuring indoor Voice over Wi-Fi deployments for customers in its Åland Islands region of Finland.
