JUNE 17, 2008 -- Spirent Communications plc (search for Spirent), which provides performance analysis and service management products, has enhanced Spirent Landslide, which the company says makes it the industry's first "services-centric" test system that takes next-generation network (NGN) testing to a new level. This comprehensive end-to-end system is specifically designed for the "any service over any network on any device, anytime, anywhere" subscriber world.
"NGN has redefined the end user experience and expectations by pushing converged network technologies to the extremes, and has created demands on service providers to deliver services that impact every aspect of their customer's life," says Brian Partridge, director, Enabling Technologies - Service Provider, Yankee Group. "This means that service providers and network equipment vendors need to adopt a 'services-centric' network testing approach."
Converged networks present a major challenge as they capitalize on mobility and are built on a model of successfully delivering interactive and engaging services across multiple technologies. The user expects the same quality of experience (QoE) regardless of the network technology. Therefore, ensuring end-to-end network service quality and validating the service layer are critical aspects to delivering the highest level of subscriber experience.
"The next-generation customer experience is about delivering valuable and interactive services to highly mobile, information-hungry subscribers over any network, at any time, to any device," says James Brunson, director of converged network solutions at Spirent Communications. "Spirent allows our customers to look beyond just testing network elements to concentrate on system-level QoE and service layer validation to bring high-quality products and services faster to market -- which directly impacts revenue potential and addresses needs of the next-generation subscriber."
With Spirent Landslide, any application over any access and any core network can be tested while simulating mobility and protocol interaction -- all within a single system. The end-to-end, IP-based test system reliably and accurately validates both systems and services prior to deployment. Test engineers are able to significantly reduce the time to develop, execute, and debug test cases; improve development cycles; and decrease engineering hours required to test new releases, says Spirent.
To create this "services-centric" test system, the company combined key Layer 4-7 functionality of the Spirent Avalanche application test system with the Landslide Performance Test System focused on wireless and converged network testing. This allows end-to-end application testing across mobile packet data networks, providing true QoE measurements for key application services such as web browsing, file transfer, streaming voice and video, and other next-generation services. With the addition of a new IPSec accelerator card, Spirent Landslide now supports increased throughput of encrypted data.
The vulnerability assessment capabilities of Spirent ThreatEx enable the user to test mobile and converged network behavior and user QoE while undergoing a broad range of emulated attacks. Spirent Landslide's now delivers double the data throughput and control traffic performance than available before. Additionally, the upgraded offering includes support for the latest Release 1 v.1.2 of the WiMAX Forum specifications, and initial LTE support for MME and end-to-end testing.
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