Viavi Solutions is adding to its list of Open RAN testing partnerships and customers, this week announcing that Rakuten Symphony will use Viavi’s TM500 Network Tester to validate performance of solutions ranging from the lab to the field.
Viavi said that the tester will be used to simulate a citywide network and “maximize resolution of any issues in the lab in order to accelerate deployment at scale.” Viavi added that more than 85% of network equipment manufacturers use the TM500 for 5G gNodeB development.
“As vendors across the industry develop open, cloud-native and disaggregated architectures, precise testing against user expectations of service quality as well as 3GPP parameters is more critical than ever to ensure success at scale,” said Rajesh Rao, Viavi’s VP of Asia Pacific and Japan. “We are excited to help Rakuten Symphony optimize their Open vRAN solutions based on our unique experience from lab to field to assurance for over 200 service providers worldwide.”
Viavi also recently was selected as the Open RAN testing partner for a test and certification lab in Korea, jointly run by the Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI).
This follows on other Open RAN-related areas of focus by the test company earlier this year, including a joint O-RAN Radio Unit conformance test solution that was developed with fellow test company Rohde & Schwarz, as well as O-RAN partnerships with Capgemini Engineering in Portugal for a lab-as-a-service offering and with Ericsson, for Viavi to deliver geolocation capabilities as a Non Real-time RIC Application (rApp) on Ericsson’s Intelligent Automation Platform.
At the recent Test and Measurement Forum virtual event, Viavi Solutions CTO Sameh Yamany discussed the ways in which both networks and testing are transforming in 5G — including how increased network openness adds to testing complexity. More on that in this story.
In other test news:
–Anritsu has unveiled a joint Wi-Fi 6E over-the-air testing solution developed with Microwave Vision Group (MVG), which combines Anritsu’s MT8862A Wireless Connectivity Test Set with an MVG multi-probe system for measuring antenna radiation patterns and other OTA tests for wireless devices.
In other company news, Anritsu said that its director of research and development, Dr. Alexander Chenakin, was elected Chair of the IEEE TC-10 Signal Generation and Frequency Conversion Committee.
–Rohde & Schwarz has unveiled a new, compact universal spectrum monitoring system and also plans to highlight its quantum computing test solutions in a joint effort with Zurich Instruments at next week’s Munich Messe.
–PCTel recently announced a strategic partnership with Stargent IoT, which focuses on IoT use cases in manufacturing, process automation and asset tracking. The two companies plan to offer end-to-end remote monitoring solutions for a variety of conditions such as air quality, temperature, acceleration, angular rate of change and magnetic fields, among others, using industrial sensors from PCTel.
Arnt Arvik, PCTEL’s VP and chief sales officer, called the partnership “a significant milestone in our strategy to expand PCTEL’s Industrial IoT devices market with our sensor portfolio. Stargent IoT’s expertise in micro cloud computing services will help us to create commercial ready plug-and-play solutions enabling our partners to deploy a wide variety of IoT applications.”
–Keysight Technologies is extending its relationship with Xiaomi, with the test company announcing that the Chinese device OEM will use Keysight’s automated field-to-lab device test platform solutions for validating the underlying technology for 5G smartphones and IoT devices.
Keysight also this week launched what it says is the industry’s first oscilloscope-based automotive protocol trigger/decode solution that covers the automotive protocol CAN XL (Controller Area Network eXtra Long), thereby enabling engineers to verify and debug automotive serial bus protocols and develop systems using the CAN/CAN FD (Flexible Data Rate) and CAN XL protocols.
–EE and Qualcomm are testing carrier aggregation with seven component carriers. Read more details here.
