Understanding complexity is the vital factor
As operators launch more services, they need to do so reliably, faster, at less cost and then be able to manage those services at a low operational cost. Having a complete service management vision, right from the design of network elements to service assurance, will be increasingly crucial, as Tektronix's David Churchill and Alois Hauk tell Keith Dyer.
Mobile Europe:
Could you give us a picture of the structure of Tektronix's communications business unit and the scope of its activities?
David Churchill:
The communications and video business unit is organised in three product families. The first is the mobile protocol test (MPT) unit, which is headquartered in Berlin and headed up by Alois Hauk. The second is the Communications Test Assurance (CTA) business, which was mainly formed when we completed the purchase of Inet on 1 October 2004. The third aspect is our video product family which is based in Beaverton, Oregon, and which will be a critical piece going forward.
The MPT business includes design centers in Padua and Shanghai and consists of three market segments. The first is functional testing at network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) of their network elements. Second is load testing, our LTS21 for testing networks under realistic load conditions. Third is portable monitoring for technical trouble shooting in either a live network or laboratory.
Mobile Europe:
How would you say Tektronix is positioned within the mobile industry as a whole?
DC:
Our whole business is organised in two areas of market activity -- network diagnostics, the biggest part of which is in Berlin, and network management, which is predominantly the former Inet business. When you put the two pieces together on the network diagnostics side we are number one in mobile protocol testing and in legacy SS7 testing. In network management, Tektronix is number one in GPRS and UMTS and number two in mobile voice and in legacy SS7. Following the Inet acquisition, we are now also a very strong player in the VoIP market and the converged fixed-mobile future.
Mobile Europe:
What did the Inet acquisition bring to the business?
DC:
On the diagnostics side, we have formed superb relationships over the years with NEMs -- superb on diagnostics and in gaining access to technology -- by working with them in the labs, getting into the food chain at a very, very early stage in the cycle to design and verify network elements.
The Inet acquisition brought great relationships with operators. As they carried out the development and deployment of networks that were more complicated, operators had to develop test and monitoring not specific to their past experiences. They bought equipment from several NEMs and their networks got very complicated.
So, consequently, they are very interested in monitoring all of that, and in protocol testing for the diagnostics piece. The need for network management is to combine diagnostics and protocol test with monitoring into a very broad portfolio. So Inet completed our portfolio for NEMs and operators, giving us the widest product breadth of any company in this sphere.
Mobile Europe:
You mentioned the change in complexity operators are faced with. What are the major challenges facing operators within the test and monitoring environment?
DC:
The important thing to realise is that the key to being a successful operator these days is being able to react to events before they happen on the network.
The other transition is UMTS R6, which will take Europe into the "real" 3G world, with tremendous flexibility in the use of devices. Then services will grow very quickly -- for example HSDPA allows greater functionality of video. And enabling and monitoring that increase in services and complexity is what we can do across our portfolio.
Alois Hauk:
Already we have launched support for R6 on our K12 protocol analyser platform. Supporting R6 3GPP is of key importance and will enable NEMs to advance the IMS type of infrastructure which is needed to put VoIP mobile calls into fixed networks, achieving the convergence of fixed and mobile networks. We can help them test faster to enable that. With the Inet acquisition we have the leading VoIP test solution so we can test functionality for VoIP as well.
Another solution of ours, the Network and Service Analyser, contains rule-based analysis algorithms which allow operators to find or predict the most likely cause of failure. Operators need to find the failure cause, and if it can be linked back to a NEM, pass it on to them for fixing.
DC:
Ten years ago the Internet as we know it today barely existed. Now you can check the weather, stock prices, etc. on your phone. It's still very new technology but the mobile phone is starting to become the converged communications device we heard so much about in the past. Ten years ago operators just had to get voice to connect. Now customer expectations are getting dramatically higher.
Mobile Europe:
So with complexity comes a new challenge for operators.
AH
Because we have worked with the equipment manufacturers in our labs, we are in a really great position with our tools to enable the rollout of a 3G world. Our first platform for mobile data testing was in 1998 and now we have a new Network and Service Analyser, which is a second-generation UMTS test solution, the LTS21 load test system and Unified Assurance UMTS RAN module. We stress test, analyse the results and then carry out performance optimisation.
We have supported HSDPA on our K15 platform since September 2004 and in March this year we released IMS support on our K12 platform.
Because customers now have to deal with a huge amount of data, the challenge is not just with technology. If a call drops they have the issue of how to find one dropped call in terabytes of data. They need to capture all this data from several days of activity, analyse it and find the root cause. Our Network and Service Analyser performs that root cause analysis -- starting at a high level with basic KPIs and then drilling down to a call trace, and then to different protocols, and asserting which protocol failed or which was the failing device. This is a unique capability in the market.
The key in network assurance is to get the data. GeoProbe is our accurate real time acquisition engine, and that can feed to other systems. That data acquisition and speed helps customers to see issues more quickly.
DC:
The movement to all IP packet networks, the transmission of voice and data and video at tremendously high speeds means a phenomenal increase in service to maintain networks. If a phone keeps dropping, the customer expectation is that the operator can find what the problem is. That means having knowledge of the signaling, network context, what services are supportable, etc. It's amazingly complicated and the skill set of operators becomes a real issue. Operators are judged on churn and ARPU -- both critical elements to operator success. Our equipment is a critical asset because it can determine what may be wrong and how to fix the problem.
Mobile Europe:
You mentioned your video expertise -- how will that be applicable in the mobile environment?
DC:
The tenders we are seeing require two new pieces of response. One is video and the second is IP. We feel we meet both requirements exceptionally well. The roots of our video knowledge are in pre- and post-production -- and we added to this through the acquisition of a UK company in the late 1990s specialising in MPEG compression. As we go forward into mobile video telephony our position is unique because no-one else has the same level of video expertise.
Mobile Europe:
The way operators think about their customers, and provide service to them is changing too.
DC:
Operators have two main customer sets, consumer and corporate, and each segment drives a lot of their behaviour. Corporate accounts and consumers have different expectations of service and performance, but one also offers more reliable revenue streams.
Corporate SLAs will be critical as operators take on the security of revenues against the cost of non-performance. That is an area where we see a tremendous amount of investment necessary to get to a level of service to satisfy corporate accounts.
AH:
Time to market and reliability are also critical. Our LTS21 load test product is new in the mobile category, and can simulate real world traffic in GPRS and UMTS. When operators want to introduce new services, in 20 seconds they can test 20,000 (simulated) users to know if it works.
The times of exhaustive testing of each service are gone. On UMTS, for example, voice is very tolerant but for video and especially in IP packets they need to make sure when they launch the service that it works the first time or else they will have lost new customers.
DC:
Operators are thinking of ways to get services to customers faster, with greater reliability and at less cost. They want to manage the services as efficiently as possible while at the same time reducing opex. This plays on three levels: first, the pure observation of the network based upon KPIs that are specific to the operator. If there is a problem, an alarm goes off and our equipment guides the operator to where the problem resides.
The second is at a higher management level -- producing reports on network services, the performance of the network, helping operators manage their performance and investment. The third is in planning for and expanding the network, and adding more services.
Our equipment fits into each one of these three blocks in a different way, leveraging our technology and understanding of the development and design of the engineering environment.
We support thousands of protocols and help operators with actionable information -- not just provide raw data.
So that's what we really do. We are doctors for the network.
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