Spirent vs the Stove Pipes

 By Rich Tehrani          

At the recent Communications Developer Conference (www.communicationsdeveloper.com) in Santa Clara, CA (News - Alert), a consistent theme was “stove pipes” (old stovepipe approaches to providing applications result in confusion and the unnecessary duplication of effort in terms of Billing, OSS and other matters) and how in the world of communications the separate stove pipes are being integrated. As this integration takes place myriad questions arise. What if all this disparate smoke needs to work together, for example? There is nothing worse than “introverted smoke”.At the show I had a meeting with Andy Huckridge of Spirent (www.spirent.com) who drew me a diagram of every service provider’s nightmare scenario; it delineates the migration to next-generation networks. As Andy describes it, in the PSTN world you had just two pieces of equipment: a line with access and a switch. There were ten vendors of the equipment you needed – referring to class 4 (“tandem”) and class 5 (“local exchange”) switches. These products generally worked on the same release cycle and subsequently it was a somewhat tame process to upgrade equipment over time.

Andy says these two primary pieces of equipment are being replaced now by ten pieces, referring to the IMS architecture. Worse, some of these products could have been built in someone’s garage and generally the knowledge to interconnect such equipment is tough to come by. The final level of complexity comes from the unsynchronized release cycles of the disparate equipment which could come from many more than ten vendors.

For this reason, Spirent is doing its best to allow service providers to roll out new services as quickly as possible while allowing them to be tested sufficiently before the rollout. How you ask? Simply by prepackaging testing suites in areas such as push-to-talk over cellular, presence and XDN.

I mentioned to Andy that at least one of the competitive vendors in the IMS testing space has told me they are taking share away from his company. Andy comments that he has a great relationship with the other testing vendors on the market but none of them have the breadth of testing capability Spirent does.

He supported his case by listing the areas where Spirent covers:

• FMC
• Application and Services
• Monitoring
• PSTN Interworking
• Call Session Control
• Billing
• Security
• Access and Transport Plane

Moreover he listed his product lines: The SPT targets the IMS core network, the Abacus targets the MGW (Multi-Gain Wireless) environment. . . Both IP and PSTN. Finally the Landslide targets the wireless packet core network.

One competitor who came up was Empirix (News - Alert) and Andy mentioned the company can only do testing in a small fraction of the areas Spirent can. He went on to say if a carrier wants a complete solution, Spirent is the best
choice for them. Spirent he says has purchased best-of-breed solutions in various areas of the communications while Empirix is molding a VoIP testing solution to fit other areas.


Another area of differentiation Andy focused on was that of testing services. He pointed out the myriad array of services being offered by today’s service providers, making it virtually impossible to predict server load in the real world environment.
Andy says that Spirent solutions allow the testing of applications under full load to determine where the failure rate may be in a given system. He mentions that Empirix does not have such a capability.

Asked about the state of IMS, Andy says there are services providers who have deployed some pure IMS services and many more IMS deployments are in the works around the world.

He says some service providers are forcing equipment vendors to solve interoperability testing and subsequently Spirent is working more closely with these companies to ensure they interoperate with one another in an effective manner.

IMS Continues to Ramp Up
Naysayers maintain that IMS is taking too long to appear, and yet news flashes keep popping up revealing new inroads by IMS into the world’s networks. For example, the Dominican Republic broadband wireless provider Onemax is going to deploy an advanced IMS over WiMAX solution, one of the first in the Americas. Onemax has selected Veraz Networks (News - Alert) , a well-known media gateway solutions provider, to actually deploy the IMS over WiMAX solution, which will include VoIP, IP-based multimedia services and connections to their brethren operators. It will be the first time in the Caribbean that such services have been delivered over mobile WiMAX (News - Alert) .

You could say that major network operators have some “inertia” to overcome, since they were stuck in the “fat dumb and happy” phase for many years, making money off of overpriced (but now increasingly less expensive) voice. Besides, Interoperability As Mark Twain would say, the reports of IMS’ demise have been greatly exaggerated.testing took up a lot of what was happening in 2006 — indeed, RADVISION (www.radvision.com) announced the launch of a new industry group, International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium, to address IMS technology interoperability issues — but it now appears that 2007 will see increasingly frequent IMS deployments. Softswitch vendors such as Sonus Networks (News - Alert) , Inc. (www.sonusnetworks.com), have announced updated IMS-ready network solutions that also include advanced support for the Electronic Number Mapping System (ENUM). And TeliaSonera has selected Nokia (News - Alert) Siemens Networks to deploy a complete IMS solution as part of TeliaSonera’s plans to offer such IP-based services such as VoIP, video calling and instant messaging.
It’s starting to appear that the world’s telcos and cablecos will be mixing up a potent brew of IMS, Web Services and a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

So IMS is still making steady progress. Perhaps not as lightning fast as investors out there would like (is any adoption rate ever fast enough for an investor?), but it’s happening nonetheless. As Mark Twain would say, the reports of IMS’ demise have been greatly exaggerated.