Lightening the load

The load carried by technicians responsible for installing and maintaining the elements that comprise wireless networks comes in two forms. There is the physical burden of lugging around multiple testers and analyzers and finding a convenient place to set them up. There also is the intellectual burden of first learning — then keeping abreast of — technologies that change faster than some people can master them.

Test equipment providers such as Acterna and Tektronix are responding not just to the needs and requests of these technicians but to the bottom line of the service providers that employ them. Driven by more constrictive economics, test companies are building modular solutions that are not only less expensive and smarter but that also let service providers keep high-priced engineers in the office and take some of the troubleshooting responsibility off of technicians.

While the latter may not sit well with already qualified technicians, it likely will sit just fine with operators that see an opportunity to fill their staff with less knowledgeable and less expensive field personnel.

Tektronix recently introduced new software capability for its NetTek YBT250 base station test platform that exploits the modular approach in order to enable base station testing for cdma2000 networks. The new software module, Option CD2, builds on the new class of modular field test tools introduced by Tektronix in February, Tektronix' YBT250 test tool already supports AMPS; cdmaONE (IS-95); and GSM 900, 1800 and 1900.

“Any technician will tell you they want tools suited for their day-to-day tasks,” said Eben Jenkins, director of marketing for Tektronix's mobile business unit. The modular platform lets technicians carry one tool rather than three or four separate boxes, and it's a fraction of the cost of a fully compliant base station analyzer.

With the addition of cdma2000 support, which the company calls a first, Tektronix hopes to offer operators a way to migrate to 3G without having to invest in new test platforms. “cdma2000 is a very attractive means for operators to migrate to 3G. And with this offering, we can support the introduction of 3G services in a cost-effective and efficient manner,” Jenkins said.

Despite the lackluster economy and hand-wringing over the outrageous prices paid for spectrum, The Yankee Group was still projecting as late as July that wireless subscriptions would double in the next five years from the current 625 million to 1.3 billion. This growth is expected to stress the network infrastructure, and consequently, operators are expected to spend billions of dollars on the transport and test equipment required to build the next-generation network capable of handling that stress.

According to some reports, CDMA is expected to garner its fair share of that growth. One report shows CDMA accounting for 22% of the worldwide wireless marketplace by 2005 (Figure 1). The migration to cdma2000 is attractive for its capacity improvements, which could be as much as 130%. The technology is being deployed this year in Australia, Canada, Korea and Mexico, as well as by some U.S. carriers.