Spirent Celebrates Record Wireless Channel Emulator Product Revenue

“We’re extremely pleased, especially considering that the SR5500 is already the most widely-used channel emulator in the market. This is major growth for an established, market-leading product which has already enjoyed tremendous market acceptance since its launch,” said Charles Simmons, president of Spirent’s wireless business.

The company attributed part of this result to new initiatives in the cellular industry. “The current focus on LTE is a big driver. LTE lives or dies on innovative, complex radio-link technologies such as MIMO. It’s extremely important to get it right,” said Spirent’s vice president, Rob VanBrunt.

“Over the past two years we’ve contributed our subject matter expertise towards unaddressed issues on our customers’ ‘wish lists’,” added VanBrunt. “Our mantra has been to ‘bring the real world into the lab’, helping the industry to reduce both cost and time to market. We’ve been able to do that. We’re delighted that these contributions have begun to pay us back so quickly.”

To increase the realism and value of lab-based testing, Spirent has recently equipped the SR5500 with motion-based MIMO channel models that test LTE channel estimation, over-the-air (OTA) MIMO testing and Virtual Drive Test, an easy-to-use yet accurate version of the “field to lab” tools which are used to replicate RF scenarios captured from live networks. Most recently, Spirent released a fully-integrated 8x2 bi-directional beamforming configuration for testing the TD-LTE technology that is expected to find success in markets such as China and India.

Spirent also cited a renewed sense of importance in the accuracy and performance of test and development tools. According to Simmons, “With LTE, our customers are laying the foundations for their business over the next ten to twelve years. Rather than gambling on marketing spin, they are taking a very hard look at the solutions they use for development and testing. Once a customer says, ‘I’m comparing competing solutions in my lab’, we usually end up with that order.”