On a Growth Spree

T&M is growing manifold due to the constantly rising subscriber base, higher penetration of technology, particularly wireless, need for QoS, and emphasis on local manufacturing

In today’s world of communications, technologies are evolving at a much faster pace, consumers are becoming demanding and there is a strong need for reducing the time-to-market. Along with the quick evolution of technologies, the need of the hour is co-existence of these technologies with better functionality, where test and measurement (T&M) companies play a very crucial role in this dynamic scenario. T&M assures the efficacy of a technology and it vividly defines a roadmap of technologies with an emphasis on the future readiness. After discovering/inventing a technology in any and every segment it is equally important to evaluate its performance before its deployment. As the telecommunications sector ascends the impressive growth curve alongside the emergence of umpteen technologies, T&M is gaining more and more prominence. There is a tremendous demand for conformance and interoperability testing between hands.

Growing Manifold

T&M is growing manifold to date because of the constantly rising subscriber base, higher penetration of technology particu- larly wireless technologies—lte, Wimax, BWA, need for QOS, and emphasis on the local manufacturing. Speaking about the T&M dynamics, Shankar Krishnamurthy, country manager, Empirix India and Sri Lanka/maldives, says, “From a technical perspective, T&M solutions must evolve to support new network protocols and service delivery methods within a single architecture. Operators who can effectively troubleshoot issues can tightly control costs. Those that can assure a great customer experience will build loyalty.” From a business perspective, operators need greater insight into customer behaviors

and application usage to make smarter decisions on infrastructure investments, pricing models, marketing campaigns, and revenue generation programs. M Mombasawala, general manager, applications, Agilent Technologies says, “T&M is imperative in providing validation in all areas of telecom, be it R&D activities from companies like Qualcomm or service provider provisioning from Ericsson or consumption from operators.”

Wireless Technologies

Introduction of third generation technologies, proposed launch of fourth generation technologies like LTE, Wimax, broadband wireless access service; and, with the next-generation technologies, telecom T&M is likely to witness strong demand in the coming years. Large scale deployments of communication technologies need large-scale emulation. In India, we predominantly have 2G networks and 3G networks are overlaid on 2G network and ensuring interoperability and interworking of this network is of paramount importance. The ability to seamlessly hand over between cells while minimizing the interruption to data throughput needs to be tested and assured as does the ability to hand over between different radio access technologies while maintaining the data connection.

T&M plays a crucial role in 3G services, in all aspects of 3G handset and field testing, including core/access network testing. T&M opportunities are increased with the beginning of 3G BTS manufacturing by network equipment manufacturers and 3G handset manufacturing. 3G handset testing and mobile application testing would fall into the testing menu of the SPS. Radio frequency measurements for spectrum clearance, coverage, and interference are a must do to ensure better 3G services. “The adoption of 3G and BWA offer tremendous opportunity. As they add new technologies, operators must include a plan for assuring them. However forward-thinking operators are taking a more strategic approach. Rather than simply installing a new probe to analyze the latest 3G protocol, these operators are choosing a holistic end-to-end T&M solution with predictive capabilities that preempt issues from impacting customers. This assures a better customer experience with significantly reducing the overall cost of troubleshooting and maintaining the network as a whole,” points out Shankar Krishnamurthy, country manager, Empirix India, Sri Lanka/maldives.

A comprehensive test of radio frequency, protocol and system level elements such as base stations, cell sites, handsets and network infrastructure in a 4G network is a major requirement for its operational efficiency. M Mombasawala, general manager, applications, Agilent Technologies mentions, “A transition to 4G/ LTE greatly increases the complexity of the task of monitoring and troubleshooting mobile data services. Service providers need to develop, deploy and manage the technology in a way that ensures a high QOS while minimizing capex and opex. The latest generation of T&M equipments help to evaluate and deploy equipment that meets specifications and quality standards, verifies new services, and accelerates problem resolution cycle time.” Carriers that get T&M would have many loyal customers on their network for long term. Both fixed and mobile Wimax, a 4G technology, have a very complex requirement in terms of characterization. Conducting a basic RF transmitter measurement on Wimax requires high performance test equipment with advanced measurement functionality. Hence ensuring

Apart from technologies, there is a dire need to test applications as well. The mobile applications will have to be tested for robustness under bad RF conditions, so as to provide a great end user experience

operational readiness of 4G networks is essential not only during the initial launch of technology but also as network and services grow and mature.

Apart from technologies, there is a dire need to test applications as well. The mobile applications will have to be tested for robustness under bad RF conditions, so as to provide a great end user experience. Besides, enterprise offerings such as cloud computing and virtualizations is also driving T&M. Referring to the T&M requirements Shankar Krishnamurthy says, “End-to-end visibility, regardless of network protocol or service delivery method, is the most important requirement for T&M today. If an operator cannot see the entire communication from start to finish, they cannot understand customer experience, Quality of Service or application performance. If an operator cannot see their entire operations, they cannot assure interoperability, cost-effectively troubleshoot issues or effectively integrate new technologies to optimize the network.”

Increasing Subscriber Numbers

The functionality of T&M tools have been accelerated due to the increasing number of wireless subscribers, increasing number of mobile devices particularly smartphones, a transition from voice to data services including mobile banking, mobile social networking applications, etc.

Service providers ought to ensure better quality of service and experience hence the need to testing has increased. In order to meet the customer expectations, SPS should ensure high quality of network performance thus channel coding, BER, latency, and throughput rates under varying conditions including fading and mobility must be tested.

Customers are more demanding than ever before, they crave for more data intensive applications–m-banking, video calling, mobile TV, etc and it is moving toward mobile networks, these can only be accepted by the user if proven for reliability and QOS. This requirement highlights the need to have measurement solutions in place to baseline these

technologies for user requirements. The increased demand for mobile services and low tolerance for poor quality has spurned investment in new technologies as well as the backhaul and core portions of the network. Only a strong T&M program can determine whether or not these investments have any impact on customer quality of experience.

Mobile operators need a solution that provides an understanding of how customers actually experience applications across the entire network. This requires an analysis of mobile communications not from a network performance point of view but from the perspective of the application as it is delivered to the customer; in other words, how well customers are able to watch Youtube videos, stream music or chat with friends. Obviously, a more holistic approach to service assurance is needed, one that correlates all services, network elements, and protocols to provide a total picture of customer experience. Without complete visibility into customer experience, operators cannot effectively assess the effectiveness and ROI of any infrastructure investment. GR Manohar Reddy, managing director, Aishwarya Telecom notes, “Operators have to buy drive testers to test the signal strength of the mobile network and wherever there is a signal then the operator has to put the repeaters to have a signal so that the mobile can work in such areas.”

Local Manufacturing

T&M meets the mission critical testing needs from the developmental stage until the deployment. Increasing R&D activities have boosted the T&M segment. Establishment of local manufacturing plants by the vendors has been fuelling the growth of the industry.

Thanks to the easy availability of engineering manpower, India has been a much sought after R&D destination for both MNCS and Indian operators to serve the local and global market. India has raised a few notches above, it no longer imports every component and deploys here but it has also embarked on manufacturing. Even when some components are shipped and assembled here, it needs to undergo certain level of conformance, verification and validation testing in which T&M plays a significant role.

Developments

Most importantly network operators, service providers and handset manufacturers have realized the need for T&M and their T&M spent has also increased relatively, of late. Testing has transitioned to onsite locations from the bench namely, cell towers, power substation yards or network control racks. This has resulted in the development of full-feature, compact and rugged tools.

In recent years, T&M vendors have re-aligned their offerings to software packages and the deployment of large scale integration (LSI) chips. Softwaredefined instruments, also known as virtual instruments, consist of modular hardware and user-defined software. This gives engineers the ability and flexibility to combine standard and userdefined measurements with custom data processing using common hardware components. This important feature has become extremely critical to adopt different communications standards.

“Apart from telecom, defense is one of the fundamental growth engines for T&M vendors in India. Some of the software giants have diversified into engineering services, this has also opened up new avenues for T&M companies as MNCS like Nokia, Ericsson, etc have offloaded

For more related articles go to voicendata.com

some part of design work to these giants,” states M Mombasawala, general manager, applications, Agilent Technologies.

The most prominent testing tools include RF, microwave testers, signal generators, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, power meters, Ethernet testers, SDH analyzers, 3G monitoring etc.

According to media reports, the procurement of T&M instruments by service providers in 2010-11—BSNL’S spent was 20 crore, MTNL’S procurement was 10.08 crore, Vodafone’s spent was 12 crore approximately, Reliance Communications procured 12 sets of T&M instruments worth 1.61 crore, Idea Cellular shelled out 6.5 crore, while TTSL invested 4 crore on T&M instruments.

Getting a Fix

T&M vendors have to work on two prominent things–one is, they should provide up-to-date testing tools at all time as T&M tools are more vulnerable to become obsolete at a faster pace. Two is, the process of measurement varies, and it does not guarantee a perfect measurement. It should constantly strive for greater accuracy in order to accommodate the greater use of technology. A relief is that T&M does provide tools to measure things otherwise too complex to measure with other instruments.

“When we look at the number of mobile connections operators have to buy lot of test equipments and in practice the procurement is very less by the operators. As most of the raw material is imported any depreciation in rupee against dollar will result in reducing the profits and in when the procurement by the operators is not increasing very much from y-o-y,” emphasizes GR Manohar Reddy, managing director, Aishwarya Telecom.

Industry consensus that the major issue in the T&M segment in India is that operators spend only 1% of their opex on T&M as compared to the 4 to 6% spent globally. As these operators better understand the benefits of a strong T&M program, growth will increase exponentially.

malinin@cybermedia.co.in