Aerospace and defense company Astronics has purchased Texas-based critical communications test company Freedom Communication Technologies. FTC focuses on test equipment for Land Mobile Radio networks, including P25 and Tetra.
Astronics said that it purchased 100% of FCT’s equity for $22 million in cash. The company was founded in 2015 and offers analyzers for testing LMR systems, as well as covering mapping, interference analysis and automated radio testing and alignment solutions. The company had $11 million in revenue in 2018, according to Astronics, and is expected to contribute about $10 million in revenue to Astronics in the second half of this year.
“FCT is a leader in wireless communications testing, primarily for the civil land mobile radio market. Their market focus and technology complements those we already have, and together, we will offer a broader range of test solutions to an expanded market,” said Peter Gundermann, who is chairman, president and CEO of Astronics. ” The acquisition gives us a stronger market position in the radio test arena, a strong brand for our offerings and a larger addressable market. We are excited to expand our test capabilities and to bring FCT on board with our test business.”
In other test news:
-Which travel hot spots have the best wireless experience? OpenSignal recently looked at 30 popular U.S. tourist destinations, ranging from large cities and beach towns to more rural locations and ranked them on the basis of average download speed, upload speed and LTE availability across mobile networks. In a blog entry detailing the analysis, OpenSignal noted that most of the vacation spots with high rankings were in the Northeast. Ocean City, New Jersey, for example, posted 39.1 Mbps average download speeds; although some cities in the West and Midwest also clocked good performance. Seattle, Washington; Kansas City; Chicago, Illinois; Portland, Oregon; and San Diego, California all had average download speeds of more than 25 Mbps, putting them well above the national average of 21.3 Mbps, OpenSignal added.
In terms of LTE availability, all but three of the 30 destinations scored above 90%, and two of those three were “on the cusp,” OpenSignal said. Flagstaff, Arizona was the only destination that fell below 85% in LTE availability, coming in at 84.9%.
–Viavi Solutions said that Samsung is using its solutions for validating 5G Standalone network performance. Viavi said that Samsung is using its TM 500 network tester and TeraVM 5G core emulator, in a partnership that “marks the first wrap-around testing of 5G standalone base station equipment, and emulating real-world conditions enables end-to-end test of the radio access network, thereby ensuring performance and reliability in the field.”
-Analyst firm Strategy Analytics said in a recent report that multi-user MIMO with eight transit and eight receive antennas provides the “biggest benefit to total system throughput and capacity” in Wi-Fi 6 systems, compared to other Wi-Fi 6 features.
“Access points with 8 x 8 MU-MIMO can simultaneously address up to four times as many 2×2 client devices as OFDMA alone,” said report author and service director Christopher Taylor in a statement. “Many entry-level and mainstream Wi-Fi 6 access points use only two or four antennas, but more than two-thirds of the access points we identified in the premium tier use the full eight.” He noted that Qualcomm, Quantenna, Marvell and Celeno off Wi-Fi 6 chipsets with 8×8 MU-MIMO capabilities; Strategy Analytics also said that there are least nine smartphones and four laptop PCs now shipping with Wi-Fi 6, and all but one of those devices fully support 8×8 channel sounding feedback to the access point.
–Rohde & Schwarz this week released a free, online e-book laying out the basics of 5G New Radio and its standardization by 3GPP as well as testing aspects of the technology, written by five of the company’s technologists.
–Keysight Technologies appointed Jeffrey Li as SVP, general counsel and secretary of the company. Li had previously served as VP, assistant general counsel and assistant secretary of Keysight since 2013. He will lead Keysight’s legal, compliance and customer contracts functions and act as secretary to the board of directors.
