Network monitoring company Accedian is pushing finer granularity in its visibility tools, with a new release that takes its sampling capabilities from one second to the millisecond range.
Accedian released the latest version of its Skylight performance sensor software and says that the capability of continuous bandwidth measurements down to one millisecond “dramatically increases its already industry-leading granularity by several orders of magnitude” and “significantly advances the performance monitoring granularity and network utilization management capabilities available for enterprise and communications service provider networks.”
That level of granularity enables CSPs and enterprises to detect and address network burstiness that can impact customer experience, but can be missed by traditional tools that sample on time intervals ranging from one minute to 15 minutes, Accedian said. Data from its solution is a critical input for big data and AI systems related to performance and customer experience, the company noted.
“More and more enterprises service providers around the world are becoming increasingly reliant on mission-critical, low-latency networks,” said Dion Joannou, CEO of Accedian. “They simply can’t afford to have limited visibility into how their network is behaving. We are committed to helping our customers remain at the cutting-edge of technical innovation, and that begins by giving them the ability to better understand network bandwidth and utilization on an extremely granular level.” He added that the level of granularity that Accedian is offering with the new solution “had never been financially viable in the past.”
Accedian also this week announced that French network operator Bouyges Telecom will be using its Skylight solution to improve the performance of its networks and services, as well as assist in planning for 5G.
“With Skylight, we are detecting issues that had previously gone undetected and now have a complete ‘telescopic and microscopic’ view of network and service performance in a single tool, which opens up a sea of opportunities,” said André Ethier, telecom engineering at Bouygues Telecom, in a statement. “There is a major network evolution underway with 5G and with this new understanding of our network, we have a fighting chance of providing SLA guarantees for new services that have performance requirements we’ve never seen before.”
In other test news:
–JCI US said that it has launched a platform for Citizens Broadband Radio Service network testing and management. The USIM Universal Authentication platform was launched under JCI’s Contour Networks brand and allows the creation of custom SIM cards for companies which are trialing CBRS and/or preparing for initial commercial deployments.
“The manner in which the CBRS spectrum has been defined leads one to assume that all you need is the base station, its software and a terminal, operating much like the current Wi-Fi plug-and-play environment. This assumption can lead to major problems for the user since the LTE environment, serving as the base technology in the CBRS spectrum, requires all of the complex processes of authentication and user management that a major Mobile Network Operator currently manages,” said Greg Deickman, president of JCI US. He said that the company hopes its universal SIM and support “will contribute in facilitating extensive adoption by a broad based user population by assisting the user to connect, test and manage the complexities associated with the operation of the base station, software and terminal on the LTE CBRS network.”
–Keysight Technologies said that its network emulation tools recently enabled Qualcomm Technologies to demonstrate the first 5G-enabled laptop with an integrated modem. The demo took place at the Computex event in Taiwan.
Keysight also announced the student finalists in its IoT Innovation Challenge, out of nearly 300 entries received from around the world. The projects ranged from an IoT system for small farmers to monitor their berry crops, to water quality monitoring and malaria detection.
The final IoT Innovation challenge event will beheld in New York this fall; winners will receive a $50,000 cash prize and $50,000 worth of Keysight test equipment for their school.
–Teledyne LeCroy expanded its Teledyne Test Tools-branded portfolio of equipment, adding a series of Rogowski Coil current probes. The probes are used to measure high-speed current pulses or alternating current; Teledyne is offering five models.
The company is launching new products under the T3 brand as a result of strategic collaborations with equipment OEMs.
-The GSMA and Linux Foundation Networking this week agreed to collaborate on a common industry framework for Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure, or NFVi. The Common NFVi Telco Taskforce committee will be hosted by the GSMA with input from the Linux Foundation, and it will define and document VNFi reference models and architectures, as well as a global VFN certification lifecycle. The reference architectures will be submitted to the Linus Foundation for testing and verification through the OPNFV Verification Program (OVP). “Open source, SDN/NFV/VNFs, and network automation have become de facto building blocks as the industry moves towards 5G,” the two organizations noted.
“Operators are undergoing a period of significant digital transformation by migrating their networks from a physical to a virtualized or cloud environment. However, this is a challenging and time-consuming process involving integrating multiple different vendors into a common infrastructure,” said Alex Sinclair, CTO of the GSMA. “By following a common approach and framework, operators will vastly reduce the time and costs associated with integration and accelerate adoption and deployment.”
