Spirent Helps to Reduce Drive Testing Costs

16th November 2010

ES Admin

0 0

Spirent Communications, a leading provider of testing solutions for wireless networks, services and devices, today announced the release of its newest Virtual Drive Test (VDT)-Conversion Tool, adding CDMA to the list of supported radio technologies, which already includes W-CDMA and GSM. The VDT-Conversion Tool is used by the wireless industry to reduce the need for drive testing by capturing RF conditions in the field and bringing them into the laboratory.

“Using a live network as a test lab is both expensive and time consuming, but that’s effectively what drive testing is,” said Will Stofega, program director, Mobile Device Technology and Trends at IDC. “You have teams of people traveling for weeks at a time. So reducing that time and cost by enabling more of the testing to be done the lab is an important innovation.”

New wireless technologies bring new challenges, such as the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna techniques used in LTE. Unless realistic field conditions can be reproduced in the laboratory, this new complexity dramatically increases the amount of drive testing required.

“Last year we introduced the Virtual Drive Test feature for our SR5500 Wireless Channel Emulator,” said Spirent’s vice president of wireless, Rob VanBrunt. “This allowed network operators and device manufacturers to capture drive-test parameters in the field, convert the captured data and use it to reliably reproduce real-world RF conditions in the lab. The new VDT-Conversion Tool enhances this offering by greatly simplifying and automating the conversion process, saving additional time and money.”

The payback on the investment in this tool can be quick. VanBrunt explains, “Identifying and fixing a problem in the field can take several weeks, but when the problem is reproduced in a laboratory, the process can often be reduced to a few days.”