Network benchmarking company P3 Group and network performance solution company InfoVista announced a partnership this week to provide global mobile network benchmarking services, combining P3’s measurement capabilities with InfoVista’s recently acquired TEMS solutions for network monitoring, testing and optimization.
InfoVista bought TEMS from Ascom in late 2016. InfoVista will provide P3 with TEMS Investigation and TEMS FleetManager for insights into service quality, and P3 will use the information to supplement its own measurement and optimization to establish its proprietary “P3 score” for network benchmarking. InfoVista will rely on P3 as a “preferred services partner”. P3 and InfoVista said that they plan to work together on projects that include “selected joint services projects & benchmarking campaigns, enabling the public to understand the performance of new services such as Voice and Video over LTE, and providing network operators with the insight and support they need to improve their delivery of those services as their networks evolve towards 5G.”
P3 recently supported the annual mobile network testing for Dutch publication Connect, which involved evaluating four national network operators for voice and data performance — including, for the first time, both regular voice calls and Voice over LTE. VoLTE results were included for Vodafone and Tele2 because they supported the technology at the time of the testing.
T-Mobile ranked first place in P3’s testing, Vodafone narrowly came in second above KPN. Tele2 came in fourth but “still [showed] very competitive results,” P3 noted. Full report (pdf) of the benchmarking here.
In other test news this week:
–Keysight Technologies has closed on its $1.6 billion acquistion of Ixia. Ixia will operate as Keysight’s new Ixia Solutions Group. Keysight said that it funded the purchase through a combination of cash on hand, public offer proceeds and additional debt.
– Tektronix launched a new arbitrary waveform generator. The AWG5200 series offers a 10 GS/s sample rate, 16-bit resolution and up to 8 channels per unit, Tektronix said.
–ActionTec said this week that it hired test company Dekra to conduct field tests on its Wi-Fi extenders in 11 test homes, and that the testing confirmed that its extenders could deliver 800 Mbps or better, compared to Wi-Fi mesh products achieving an average of 300 Mbps or less.
-The U.S. Air Force‘s Global Positioning System Modernization Program is moving forward with testing of a next-gen GPS operational control system by Raytheon, which is moving to Schriever Air Force Base in ??? after having achieved a pass rate of 97.7% at the Raytheon factory where it was built. Next up for the system is site-specific qualification and acceptance testing, including verification of its external interfaces and how it performs with control hardware at Schriever, as well as cybersecurity checks.
Dave Wajsgras, president of Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services, said in a statement that the system will ultimately deliver “enhanced GPS for millions of users worldwide.”
-IT network management company LiveAction said that it completed compatibility testing with Cisco APIC-EM to verify the success of its integration for monitoring and validating deployments of software-defined Wide Area Network deployments.
-Internet of Things-focused IPSO Alliance said that it is starting work on an interoperability model that “allows smart objects to interoperate with each other, regardless of the device’s protocol, security, bootstrap or commissioning.” IPSO Alliance said that its guidelines were first released in 2014 and updated in 2015, and have generated more than 500 downloads in the past six months. Member companies of IPSO Alliance include Oracle, Ericsson, ARM, Bosch, Intel and Silicon Labs, among others.
