Editor’s Note: The ability to test network and device features and functions is an important piece of technology development and deployment. RCR Wireless looks weekly at test and measurement news to see what’s afoot.
— EXFO saw its sales drop slightly in the most recent quarter, to $59.7 million compared to $60.9 million in the same period last year. This was EXFO’s fiscal fourth quarter, and its annual sales for fiscal 2014 were down 4.7% from 2013, to $230.8 million for the year.
Germaine Lamonde, chairman of EXFO, said that the company was impacted by a “challenging” first quarter but then picked up speed the rest of the year, with bookings growth of 6–10% in the last three quarters.
“This bookings trend demonstrates we have passed an inflection point on the strength of several new products and solutions that are starting to have a consistent market impact,” Lamonde added. The company also implemented $6 million of cost savings in the year, he said, and has won recent Tier-1 wireless operator contracts that are expected to start appearing as revenue in its second 2015 quarter, as well as making two acquisitions of Bitsphere and Aito.
EXFO reported that its sales were down nearly 5% year-over-year in the Americas, down 4.5% in Europe and the Middle East, and down 4.3% in Asia-Pacific.
—Spirent Communications has a new solution for Wi-Fi and fixed line network monitoring. AxonPulse is part of the company’s enterprise initiative and is aimed at enterprise IT departments in areas. Spirent said that the offering “complements passive visibility solutions by accurately simulating customer network activity and measuring their experience.”
AxonPulse has three components: a core component for data centers and fixed-line network centers for monitoring and testing 1G and 10G wired infrastructure; a network-edge option called AxonPoint for testing fixed line and Wi-Fi networks at branch offices, including performance assessment for public apps such as Facebook; and AxonCloud, which gives configuration and management access to field techs and IT managers.
Spirent described several use cases, including hotels using the solution to test Wi-Fi connectivity for guests while checking in guests at the same time; a retail store testing point-of-sale networks or a proprietary app over its Wi-Fi network; or large venues testing their public Wi-Fi connectivity.
— Anritsu has a new director of research and development for its microwave measurement division (MMD): Dr. Alexander Chenakin, a widely published expert in the field of frequency synthesis and “considered by many to be a signal synthesis guru, due to his involvement in developing many trailblazing signal generator products,” according to Don Mulder, SVP and general manager of Anritsu MMD.
—JDSU is expanding its RANAdvisor TrueSite test solution to include voice over LTE call quality testing for handset-to-handset VoLTE calls. The company said that the testing can be done with multiple handsets at the same time, managed from an Android tablet, and that POLQA MOS call quality can be assessed along with additional RAN, IMS and RTP parameters.
—Keysight Technologies has a new series of wide dynamic range power sensors, with four USB models for wireless and radar applications such as chipset and power amplifier manufacturing. The U2040 X-series also includes a LAN model for satellite testing. Keysight said the new sensors have a 96 dB dynamic range from -70 dBm to +26 dBm, and cover all of the common wireless signal formats including LTE, LTE-A and 802.11ac.
–Swedish test company Polystar‘s Solver VoLTE solution, which helps operators test implementations of VoLTE and SVRCC, won recognition as the best test and measurement LTE product at LTE Asia.
