As the mobile Internet continues to weave through the fabric of business productivity and consumer use, powerful smart phones, lightweight netbooks, social media outlets and interactive applications are a few tools facilitating the increasing demand for mobile broadband services.

 

According to Mu Dynamics, mobile data traffic is expected to increase more than a hundredfold over the next five years, as network operators scale their increasingly complex networks in a cost efficient manner in a bid to meet customers’ seemingly insatiable desire for increased mobile coverage and capacity.

 

The Sunnyvale-based Mu Dynamics is a pioneer in helping vendors eliminate NGN service downtime through proactive service assurance. The Company’s analyzer was designed to support integration with a wide variety of test lab environments including load generation, functional testing, open and proprietary standards.

 

Now, with the growing demand on increased coverage in the mobile space there comes the need to proactively test Long Term Evolution (LTE (News - Alert)). LTE, as defined by 3GPP Release 8, is the transition between 3G and true 4G.

 

In a recent report from Mu, the company breaks down the five barriers to LTE success.

 

Market watchers are expecting the LTE uptake to be fast with commercial service rollouts hitting stride by 2010. ABI Research (News - Alert) forecasts more than 32 million LTE subscribers by 2013. Market researcher Infonetics is even more optimistic, and projects that the number of LTE subscribers could exceed 72 million in the same timeframe.

 

As of early 2009, more than 18 telecom providers have committed to deploy LTE, according to the report.

 

As network operators design, deploy and operate their LTE infrastructures, in concert with their existing mobile infrastructure, they must be prepared to manage the unexpected. And vendors too must be ready for the unexpected as they design and develop innovative LTE hardware and software solutions.

 

Today, operators and vendors alike have mature test processes to verify new product interoperability, functionality and performance, yet LTE creates a new set of challenges.

 

Successful carriers will roll out innovative mobile services, powered by their highly available, operationally efficient LTE infrastructures. They will dream up new services, based on the possibilities of new technology, while relying on proven processes and tools to mitigate unforeseen risks of network availability, reliability and security. They will deftly manage the transition from their current infrastructure to LTE and beyond while meeting their customers’ expectations, whether those customers are on the cutting edge or happy with the status quo.

 

However, before they achieving these goals, companies must overcome five key barriers to success with LTE.

 

An operationally efficient network is the difference between a highly profitable service and an unprofitable one. The capital cost of any network is but a fraction of the total cost of ownership (TCO), and LTE is no different. In fact, NIST estimates that it is 30 to 50 times cheaper to fix a bug in development than in the field.

In any major new technological initiative, the standards are in flux at the outset. This is especially true of LTE, where vendors are adding value-added extensions or add-ons to the base specification in order to differentiate their solutions in the marketplace. The ability to take advantage of these differentiated offerings in turn could give an operator a sustainable competitive advantage.

Vendors who take a proactive approach to assessing the robustness and security of their new products are in a stronger position to win in the marketplace – at a lower cost. By assessing the products before the ship, vendors can avoid expensive product recalls and bug fixes.

An untested landscape is fertile ground for the unexpected. LTE services must meet, if not exceed, the 99.999% gold standard for uptime. Subscribers want a faster service to support their mobile lifestyle, but they also want a service that’s consistently reliable. Five-nines a lower TCO. Network operators must be able to assess that products work as advertised during the vendor selection process.

As operators turn up higher speed mobile services, the LTE network must support legacy users to protect the current revenue base. Legacy subscribers will be more likely to switch providers if their existing service is negatively impacted by the roll out of next-generation services – and vice versa.

 

The Mu Solution significantly increases test coverage by several orders of magnitude and helps automate and ultimately reduce test creation time for a new space like LTE. The company Mu is taking a leading role in helping network operators and vendors prepare their test strategy to overcome the top five barriers to success with LTE. Mu made similar efforts in the early days of IMS, such as participating in the IMS Plugfest and being early to market with IMS test suites for the Mu Test Suite.

 

The Mu Test Suite embodies a systematic and repeatable process to identify weaknesses in any IP-based application or network, including LTE, IMS, IPTV (News - Alert) and VoIP. The Mu Test Suite then dynamically generates actionable remediation information on-demand to assistin pinpointing and resolving the discovered issues, verifying the efficacy of proposed fixes through an onboard regression database.

 

To learn about the overall process and how network operators, vendors and critical infrastructure providers rely on Mu to help them build reliable networks and products as part of a secure, high quality SDLC read the full report here.

 

And to learn more about VoIP Robustness Testing check out the channel on TMCnet here.