Adam Smith is a 15-year veteran of working with radio frequency aspects of wireless testing and has
been with test company LitePoint since 2012. He recently took over as director of marketing for LitePoint, and spoke to RCR Wireless News about his perspective on a number of industry trends and their potential impacts on the testing ecosystem.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What trends does LitePoint see in manufacturing test and the telecom industry in general, that are relevant to test and measurement?
We are seeing some interesting trends in our core businesses in both cellular and connectivity technologies.
Clearly, we’re seeing a focus with 4G rollout in places like Japan, Korea, North America and parts of Europe. A maturing technology, 4G is starting to evolve toward LTE-Advanced, but at the same time we’re now seeing massive rollouts in China in LTE deployments, which include both LTE and LTE-A features.
We’re getting a lot of questions from customers about LTE-Advanced – what does this mean for test? How do I test this? And another thing we’re seeing a lot of are the smaller cell sizes vs. the macro stations. It seems like everybody has been talking about small cells.
What are your customers saying about small cells?
It kind of depends on who’s asking the question. We are working with macrocell companies that are making small cells, moving from the big base stations, and also manufacturers moving in from consumer types of products into networks. The macro base station guys sometimes try to treat [small cells] like a base station, from a test point of view. They ask, “Which of the standard tests can you perform, and how do we make this economical?” In the area of test, the consumer device manufacturers tend to have a good grasp on how to achieve the right economics, and drive small cell test in a direction similar to handsets.
One thing we’re definitely seeing in the handset side is [that] the front-end RF complexity is dramatically growing, because spectrum is so fragmented around the globe. There are over 40 LTE bands defined, and in order to support all the bands to make a world phone, the [manufacturers] have had to increase the number of antennas in their phones.
The “Internet of Things” is expected to continue to gain momentum and play a significant role in 5G. What trends do you see in IoT and testing?
IoT is a fun one. Everyone’s excited about IoT. I love gadgets, so I love seeing all these types of devices that are coming out. More specifically to our business, what I’m seeing are two things driving: time-to-market and cost.
These Internet of Things guys, they really have to focus on time to market and how they make their products really simple for the user to use. These companies don’t have large test development departments. What we’re looking to do is more of a consultation-type of arrangement, a different way of doing test. If [an IoT] company makes one SKU of one product and 10 models, and turns the crank, this is a very high-mix, low-volume type of market. A lot of different products, but not millions of runs. For some of these smaller companies, investing in lots of test infrastructure is really just not feasible. We need to look at some different test technologies, not necessarily new wireless technologies. IoT products commonly use BlueTooth, some Wi-Fi, some [near field communication]. It’s probably going to be more on the test vendors as to how we make test more cost-effective and easier to implement.
IoT is a game changer. From a test point of view, just scaling what we’re doing today is not cost-effective, and your time to market can suffer – that’s really where I would expect to see more change. I can’t talk specifically about what we’re doing in that space, but you need to do test in such a way that you push a button and go, you’re not writing scripts.
What do you see in terms of trends in short-range wireless technologies?
The adoption of NFC technology into smart devices is quite high now, but there really isn’t this mission-critical, well-adopted system in place yet. There is a wide level of quality in different products as well as wide levels of interest … but there are some very large companies vying for the business. I do see that the combination of biometric identification and NFC is starting to drive people to do upgrades for a handset. NFC has been an option on phones for a decade, but it’s really not going to be useful in the current economy without upgrading the security. Even with a 2-year-old handset, you need to do some hardware upgrades [for biometric sensors].
We’ve also been working more on the software level as we work with more and more customers. We’re also talking more about big data – our big data focus is more on R&D than for manufacturing, and how to shrink the time from when an engineer gets that first sample to when they get something into production.
What are your customers asking for in terms of LTE-Advanced testing?
Carrier aggregation has been deployed in a few areas. It’s two-carrier, and we’re starting to see three-carrier in Japan and Korea. But it doesn’t unlock all the power that you will get from LTE-A. MIMO hasn’t been fully adopted in mobile, and there’s no killer app driving that.
From a manufacturing test point of view, I would say that the implementations of CA being done at present are quite rudimentary and pretty easy. It doesn’t do anything that’s too fancy. Today, most deployments are interband because of the spectrum available, although the intraband stuff is starting to be driven more by China as it opens up more TDD spectrum. For the carriers, it seems to be simpler to just add more bands. They are freeing up more spectrum as they can, and I think we’ll start to see 2G spectrum refarmed and turned on, which seems to be a more economical approach for the short-term.
What are your thoughts on 5G at this point in its development?
It’s such a huge cloud of ideas right now. People are talking about merging technologies that are not so common in consumer devices, but at the same time, privacy, security and interoperability will continue to be important. For me, 5G is more like a new way of doing data access and interoperability among different technologies – it’s not really a new technology, it’s integrating everything under a 5G cloud. I would argue that 5G is here today – I can startup an LTE call and hand over to Wi-Fi at home. It’s about making smart devices smarter, so that you’ve got this core connection to the network and the device is smart enough to figure out, “What is my best path to access data?” From a test point of view, for existing technologies the test solutions exist, but we’ll see more testing of interoperability, security and user experience – testing the device as it’s going to be used.
I think certainly in the early rollouts of 5G, there’s going to have to be testing on a sample-type basis. The economics are going to drive that, but the fact is that in these devices, even small manufacturer variances can cause user-experience problems – a screen causing desensitivity to Wi-Fi or disrupting the signal so a call gets dropped. Manufacturer variations can impact these things. But can I do testing on every single device when I’m shipping 2 billion? It’s TBD. You’re going to see more people on more devices, and certainly the price of the product and the margin with that product is going to determine the quality experience of the consumer.
I wouldn’t expect to see a mainstream rollout of wildly different wireless technologies in the next five years. The advances are really around software development, on making sure that the technology operates the best way that it can. There are a lot of poor user experiences, and there’s going to be a lot more energy put around making the existing technologies just work and make them simpler.
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