Mu Dynamics has launched its new Mu Studio module, which is designed to expand the company's Mu Test Suite by automating the creation and application of complex, custom and proprietary test case scenarios to pinpoint critical software weaknesses.

 

The California-based company provides network operators and vendors network application testing for converged services.

 

The new Mu Studio leverages the existing platform to use at more than 100 locations globally including the vast majority of leading network operators and their vendor suppliers, according to Peter Fetterolf, a partner at Network Strategy Partners, LLC. 

 

“Mu Studio is helping operators and vendors where it matters most, in revenue-growth areas like LTE/4G applications since with the addition of growing speeds, traffic and complexity highlights the obvious missing element of network testing,” Fetterolf said. “Mobile and fixed networks are continuing their steady march towards service delivery models and that requires stateful network application testing within engineering development, QA verification and support team field issue remediation.”

 

As TMCnet recently reported, with growing demand for increased coverage in the mobile space, the need to test Long Term Evolution, or "LTE (News - Alert)," as defined by 3GPP Release 8, as the transition between 3G and 4G, has emerged.

 

The financial benefits of this testing solution are significant and measurable. For multiple customers, Operating Expenses for QA groups adopting these techniques have more than offset the Capital Expenditure cost in just the first release cycle. Mu’s testing approach delivers more than 10x test coverage and better ROI when compared with prior approaches, which were very labor-intensive if conducted at all. 

 

According to Mu Dynamics, mobile data traffic is expected to increase more than one-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.

 

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.

 

Until now, according to Fetterolf,  operators and vendors working under strict time constraints to deploy new services like 4G/LTE and IMS would need to develop their own test cases or wait months for commercial test vendors to provide a solution, according to Mu. Mu Studio is designed to capture the traffic and immediately test it.  In addition, Mu’s new online packet management and sharing application, pcapr.net, is designed to complements Mu Studio by offering the testing industry’s broadest and deepest online packet repository for creating custom test cases.

 

The company says Mu Studio accelerates development and deployment, reduces operational costs to shorten development time and resource requirements while bolstering product quality for new, cutting-edge protocol implementations.

 

According to the company, Mu Studio delivers a robust testing methodology that addresses:

The Mu Studio test module is designed to deliver highly reliable, available and secure products supporting rapidly emerging next-generation IP-based service rollouts, for example, for IPTV, IMS, LTE, which has been considered to very tough assignment in the past. This was because most of these emerging markets require complex, multi-protocol interactions highly specific to the deployments at a given network operator, so a least common denominator approach to test tool development is insufficient. 

 

In releasing Mu Studio, Mu Dynamics also empowers operator deployment/support teams as well as developer QA/support teams to test new services or products thoroughly, without waiting for their test tool vendors to build solutions to fit their needs, the company said. The result is faster development and deployment cycles with higher quality at reduced costs for Mu customers.

Edited by Michael Dinan