Front and center

Mundane but mandatory - that's how test and measurement has been perceived for many years. Sure, it's what guarantees the soundness of network infrastructures and thus provides a foundation for the rest of the telecommunications world, but perhaps because testing has to respond to advances rather than cause them, it's never been seen as a particularly exciting field.

That's all changing. With service level agreements becoming a way of life, and quality of service becoming a differentiation, the value of testing is now tied directly to the carrier's bottom line. This is leading to a new generation of test equipment - one that's more closely integrated into the carriers' network management systems. At the same time, other measurement systems are taking aim at smaller, specific problems that would have drawn little concern during the pre-competition era but are now seen as potential causes of churn.

The Supercomm exhibit floor was populated by more than 50 vendors elbowing for position in this revitalized market, testing everything from intermittent errors at the network edges to ATM protocols and remote monitoring. In the recent past, this depth of testing would have been dismissed as providing little return on investment. Today, however, technology to automate many of the testing functions has lowered operating costs, and the emerging competitive environment has carriers more conscious than ever of the bottom-line ramifications of service problems.

All these next generation devices have one thing in common: the understanding that gathering measurements and data is one thing, but converting it into useful information is another. This understanding was key to the agreement between test equipment vendor TTC and Clear Communications, an agreement that will allow carriers to analyze their networks and quickly respond to that data. Certainly, this agreement is a prototype for other partnerships to come.

Test and measurement equipment serves as the eyes and ears of carriers' networks, and management systems are their networks' brains. At long last, thanks to competition, carriers are becoming concerned about connecting the two.