Benchmarking company P3 Communications has been busy of late, expanding its operations and partnerships with companies such as InfoVista, and has received a few shout-outs on its testing during recent results calls from wireless operators.
During the recent 5G North America, P3 Communications CEO Dirk Bernhardt spoke with RCR Wireless News about three areas of gaps in benchmarking: the methodology gap between various approaches such as traditional network testing versus crowd-sourcing and other strategies; the analysis gap, where carriers have large amounts of data on network performance but not enough actionable intelligence; and the engineering gap, a question of who is going to implement the changes that need to happen in order to act on that intelligence.
“These three gaps we’ve identified, and we’re trying to fill. If we don’t do this, we don’t drive enough value out of the huge costs that network measurement and testing entails,” Bernhardt said.
Lest anyone think test results and methodologies are mere semantic quibbles, Verizon took a certain “discount carrier” to task this week with a post by Mike Haberman, VP of network operations which opined that “Some [competitors] like to slice and dice data, and cherry pick facts to make claims that don’t tell the full or accurate story.” Haberman accused the unnamed “discount network” of “only reporting out on its 4G LTE network tests, ignoring test results when their devices fall back to its 3G network;” “giving speed test traffic on its network preferential treatment to make the results appear better than they actually are” and making covered population claims that allegedly couldn’t be reproduced by a third party.
Listen to the interview with Bernhardt below:
In other test news:
–Keysight Technologies and the University of California San Diego put together a 28 GHz “5G” demo that achieved up to 18 Gbps speeds in a bidirectional phased-array link, with a 64-element phased array that wasn’t calibrated — a point that means lower implementation costs, Keysight noted.
The array supported a data rate of 12 Gbps at 0 degrees and more than 8 Gbps “over all scan angles up to ±50 degrees in azimuth and +/-25 degrees in elevation at a link distance of 300 meters,” Keysight reported, and 18 Gbps at shorter distances.
“The results of our continuing collaboration with UC San Diego and the demonstrated advances in millimeter-wave technology provide critical proof of viability for 5G, especially in the fixed-broadband use case, which many pre-standardization efforts focus on,” said Dr. Mark Pierpoint, VP and GM for Keysight Internet Infrastructure Solutions, in a statement.
Keysight also announced this week that it is working with RDA Microelectronics on faster testing and validation of its new narrowband internet of things designs, using Keysight’s NB-IoT performance test offering.
–Viavi Solutions launched a remote spectrum monitoring solution called CPRIAdvisor that is aimed at monitoring and troubleshooting radio frequency issues for cell sites with fiber fronthaul, including macro towers with fronthaul links, centralized Radio Access Network deployments or distributed antenna systems. Viavi said that the remote spectrum monitoring strategy can “save mobile service providers up to 50 per cent in terms of time and cost compared to current practices in place for monitoring and troubleshooting,” depending on the network configuration.
-Analyst firm Frost & Sullivan said this week that software-heavy, platform-based services will drive significant growth in the test and measurement professional services market. Frost said that globally, advanced professional services for T&S generated $254.4 million in revenue last year and that figure is expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 16.9% until 2021.
“Traditional offerings are focused on repair, calibration, leasing, and instrument tracking. In the future, the market will see a boom in software-centric service solutions, end-to-end business processes and operating systems, and fee-based business models,” said Frost & Sullivan Measurement & Instrumentation Services 2.0 Lead Analyst Mariano Kimbara. “A potential growth scenario is T&M manufacturers expanding their service lines and pursuing open partnerships with software analytics players to harness new revenue streams and synergies.”
–Audi will be the first company to test autonomous vehicles in the state of New York, after winning permission for a demonstration to be held near the state capital of Albany in mid-June.
–Rohde & Schwarz has now fully integrated Samsung Galaxy S8 phones into its QualiPoc, Benchmarker, and Freerider test products so that the S8 can be used to test user experience and assess features such as 4×4 multiple-input-multiple-output.
Rohde & Schwarz also recently launched broadband amplifiers to support 5G testing, and the company also this week introduced a new SMA100B analog radio frequency and microwave signal generator that has a frequency range up to 20 GHz that it says has the “lowest possible phase noise at all offset frequencies” as well as “extremely low” harmonics for the purposes of testing reliably without a signal source affecting the test results.
