PCTel is opening up a test lab focused on Wi-Fi performance at its Bloomingdale, Ill. headquarters. The new lab will provide wireless performance testing for Wi-Fi access points and devices equipped with PCTel antennas — including industrial IoT products, the company said. The lab will also provide cellular device testing for carrier “pre-certification.”
PCTel said that its engineers will leverage the lab to both evaluate and optimize the performance of Wi-Fi APs and IoT devices that have the company’s antennas, and help clients get a jump on certification testing.
Another new lab is opening up in Apeldoorn, The Netherlands, with a focus on testing video and video applications. This one comes from video delivery company Divitel, which said that the lab is the first of its kind in Europe and is aimed at speeding up time-to-market for new video services and applications on a wide range of devices.
In other test news:
–Teledyne Technologies reported that it had a record increase in sales for the third quarter. Sales were up more than 25% year-over-year, to $662.2 million for the period compared to $526.8 million during the previous year’s third quarter. Profits were $69 million, up from $52 million during the same period in 2016. Robert Mehrabian, chairman, president and CEO of Teledyne, said that the company’s digital imaging segment “performed exceptionally well,” but that the company “also achieved strong organic revenue growth in each Instrumentation product group and the majority of our government and defense businesses.” Teledyne’s instrumentation unit, which includes its test and measurement equipment, saw sales rise more than 11% to $2352.5 million for the quarter.
–RootMetrics released the results of its most recent testing of the Philadelphia, Pa. wireless market and concluded that the “best performance” in the market is actually a three-way tie among AT&T, T-Mobile US and Verizon. T-Mobile US took the top spot for network speed and data performance, clocking a median download speed of 38.3 Mbps and median upload speed of 17.5 Mbps. Verizon was the winner in call performance and network reliability, and AT&T shared first place with the other two carriers in two other categories, including text performance.
-The University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab has added new equipment from Teledyne LeCroy for copper cable testing for 25/50/100G Ethernet testing as well as protocol testing.
–Anritsu will be collaborating with Keycom on radar testing for the automotive market in North America, and also recently made upgrades to its MT8862A wireless connectivity test set for expanded support in WLAN applications such as smart home and connected cars.
–Rohde & Schwarz is being used by Florida broadcast station for its 600 MHz repack transition. The PBS member station in Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, WPBT, is using a turnkey repack solution from R&S with services including equipment installation and decommissioning of old equipment, site surveying and other services for the station’s internal team, as well as a new broadcast transmitter.
–EXFO launched a passive optical networking-aware power meter this week, which is says is an industry first. The PPM-350D PON power meter “automatically detects and adapts test parameters for the PON technology in use at the customer premises,” as service providers deploy multiple PON technologies to serve different customers.
“With next-gen PON upgrades underway in every region, seamless upgrades require the overlaying of new wavelengths on existing fibers as operators combine existing PON with next-gen PON solutions,” said Julie Kunstler, principal pnalyst for Ovum’s Next-Gen Infrastructure Practice. She added that the PON meter allows testing and fixing of customer connections “without needing to know an operator’s specific upgrade roadmap.”
–Ixia has a new software version of its network packet broker, so that the broker can run on open networking switches. The Network Visibility Operating System offering “transforms open switches into [networkpacket brokers]”, the company said, to provide visibility at the rack and data center level.
