Now that the blitz of news from Mobile World Congress has subsided, let’s take a look at some of the top network testing trends that emerged as particular areas of interest for the industry, now and going forward.
LTE-Advanced rolls on. Perhaps the most obvious and the broadest network testing trend coming out of MWC is simply the continued evolution of LTE, and that test companies, as usual, are at the forefront of supporting the development and implementation of the latest features. Not only did MWC see a number of announcements of test labs expanding their capabilities to include IMS and RCS, but we’re already starting to see movement beyond two-component-carrier Carrier Aggregation testing to 3CC from some of the major vendors.
Focus on small cells. As infrastructure evolves, so will testing – and small cells continue to garner attention in the infrastructure realm. MWC spotlighted small cells with awards, including Huawei’s LampSite and Airvana’s OneCell cloud-RAN small cell solution being recognized with infrastructure and innovation awards. The Small Cell Forum made its latest release, outlining approaches to the use of small cells in remote and rural applications. As networks densify with small cell coverage indoors and out, test vendors have responded with smaller, lighter, more portable testing equipment to address the increase of walk testing compared to drive testing, and that trend is expected to continue. (For more on small cell testing, RCR Wireless News is hosting a webinar and posting a new special report on the topic tomorrow.)
5G chatter. Yes, 5G is mostly a marketing term at this point and there are only very vague suppositions being posited about what it will consist of, technologywise. But you had China Mobile and Keysight demonstrating large-scale antenna systems and software for early exploration, while vendors including Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung used the show as a chance to present their 5G visions in areas including backhaul, MIMO and others.
PIM is still an issue, and both infrastructure equipment manufacturers and test companies are continuing their efforts to address passive intermodulation, in the very noise-sensitive LTE environment. Kaelus demonstrated both new PIM testing equipment as well as new low-PIM-certified products in amplifiers and other distributed antenna system solutions, and CommScope launched what it is calling a “groundbreaking” PIM test solution over the Common Public Radio Interface by connecting to a cell site baseband unit and performing an active test.
“The intense scrutiny of PIM is not going away, and we envision a resource like our optical PIM tester will become a fundamental part of every operator’s effort to minimize PIM,” said Morgan Kurk, SVP for wireless at CommScope.
Voice over Wi-Fi/Wi-Fi calling. Perhaps driven, at least in part, by Cisco’s recent Visual Networking Index data on the role that Wi-Fi will continue to play in both data and voice offload (particularly as voice becomes data traffic with wider deployment of VoLTE, and the potential for the use of LTE in unlicensed Wi-Fi frequencies), VoWi-Fi saw some new product demos including Ruckus Wireless’ newly announced Wi-Fi calling product. Spirent focused on new offerings in this area to test handovers between Wi-Fi and cellular.
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