The lack of certain infrastructure testing equipment will slow the rate at which many digital wireless telecommunications providers roll out service, says a Maryland-based test equipment manufacturer.
“We’ll probably see mass deployments (of digital services) come together at a slower pace than they potentially could if more test equipment were readily available,” said Mark Cortner, market product line manager for Telecommunications Techniques Corp. “What it will force the operators to do is to be a little more deliberate in the way they roll out than they prefer.”
The shortage involves complex testing equipment that includes monitoring systems, embedded systems and portable equipment utilized when a field engineer is trying to trouble shoot and verify network problems, said Cortner.
Equipment is readily available for the testing of the physical link and the protocol link, he said, but “what is not available is equipment that looks at the same information off of the air interface. The information that goes through the base station and base station controllers. There’s a certain amount of blindness for the network operator, and there’s not a large number of solutions available in that area.”
However, carriers won’t delay rollouts because of the lack of the right field test and measurement equipment, said Cortner. Their time frames will be driven by the infrastructure and handset availability. But, “not having that equipment will impact the rate at which they are able to continue to roll out service. Instead of being able to provide capacity in all of their cell sites by a certain date, they may put a third of that capacity in there,” said Cortner.
“There is a lot of pressure to get service out,” he added. “What you would have is a very controlled partial deployment-enough to say that you’re offering service. It’s a race to see how quickly you can get your network up and running efficiently and sign up customers. That’s a business problem that could turn into a bad public relations problem. But if you delay, you don’t sign up any customers.”
A large part of the shortage problem has to do with the immaturity of Time Division Multiple Access and Code Division Multiple Access digital technologies, said Cortner. Both Interim Standard 136 and IS-95-based equipment are typically manufacturer independent, which means each vendor’s equipment may function differently, and each vendor’s base station may communicate with a switch in a different manner, he said. “This is a challenge to test equipment manufacturers. Basically you have to customize to a specific manufacturer.”
Global System for Mobile communications technology has had nearly 10 years to mature and requires less manufacturer-specific techniques because the specifications tend to be the same throughout the network, said Cortner.
The adoption of an open interface by vendors may ease the pain for testing equipment makers. IS-634 Revision A is expected to be published by July. Under the specification, manufacturers still can create equipment that functions in a different manner, but switching systems and base stations must communicate in the same way, said Steve Jones, chairman of a Telecommunications Industry Association committee that oversees the publication of the standard.
Though other types of test equipment may not be scarce, cost is a main factor affecting their deployment. The price of virtually all equipment is high and many carriers, especially start-up companies that have no income coming in, can’t allocate enough money for all the equipment they need.
Personal communications services “infrastructure is costing [carriers] probably millions of dollars, and that’s without testing equipment,” said Sam Strang, director of sales for Marconi Instruments Inc., a testing equipment provider in Fort Worth, Texas. “The cheapest test set for CDMA is $50,000, and that checks the subscriber units only.”
The cost factor again lies with the fact that U.S. carriers use multiple technologies.
“The waveforms used for TDMA, GSM and CDMA are all very different,” said Strang. “It typically takes three very different pieces of equipment. That’s expensive.”
The cost and problems associated with the two-way paging industry are no different. The cost of test equipment to service a two-way pager costs $70,000 for setup, said Tom Daly, messaging marketing manager at Motorola Communications Test Equipment in Scottsdale, Ariz.
“There is a cost factor. The problem is that you have to develop test equipment in parallel with development of the system. You have to deal with the variables of start-up and design test equipment around a specification. The cost is very high,” said Daly. “With a small rollout, there are very high development costs resting initially on a very small market.”
Because the investment in test equipment does not generate quick revenues, companies tend to steer their investments towards revenue generating services.
“Carriers aren’t investing in it in conjunction with manufacturers to prioritize new features and services,” said Cortner. If carriers have to decide between spending money on short messaging services or enhanced testing equipment, they will choose short messaging services, he added. “Test equipment is looked at as a cost. Enhanced services are looked at as new revenue. Oftentimes what will happen is there is a certain amount of capital purchases for test and measurement equipment. As a network is rolling out, capital may be available the next year for more testing equipment … Everyone has fixed resources.”
Since manufacturers also have fixed resources, they must decide how to best allocate those resources and produce equipment carriers want. They have placed a lesser priority on producing test equipment technology, said Cortner. This has created a separate test market.
Manufacturers tend to be more focused on developing their products and getting them operational for commercial service, said Cortner. Their products typically aren’t meant as an operational support tool for service providers themselves.
“Way back in the very beginning, the applied research part is when tests should be evaluated. [Manufacturers] tend to work on the technology without working on the test technology at the same time. And that’s where we feel our role should be,” said Daly. “They do a good job of getting equipment working, but does it work completely as a system and is it testable and is it economically efficient?”
But test equipment providers have limited resources as well. Because the U.S. market supports several technologies, test equipment manufacturers themselves have to decide what the best investment is.
It “comes down to a business decision made by test equipment manufacturers,” said Strang. “Is the market big enough for this type of equipment, and how many competitors will I have when I’m done developing it? We’re all faced with questions on a weekly basis of, `Are you going to support this technology’?”
Cortner agrees, “In the U.S. market you have a variety of digital test technologies competing with each other. Which one do you go after first and how do you continue to sustain one product and go after another opportunity? How do you balance meeting the needs of a technology segment?”
