Newfound pizazz

As the telecommunications industry evolves, the image of test and measurement and network monitoring tools also changes. No longer dull-but-necessary components of network operations, these tools are becoming key elements in guaranteeing that services are available, service level agreements are being met and customers are happy enough to stay with their current carriers.

Supercomm '97 highlighted this expanded role for network testing devices, with equipment vendors providing a host of solutions that focus precisely on specific, hard-to-overcome problems. The show also played host to a number of approaches that more closely integrate testing and management functions to shorten the response time to problems uncovered by text devices.

In a move indicative of this trend, TTC and Clear Communications announced an alliance to develop complete management and testing solutions, leveraging TTC's line of testing equipment and Clear's family of network management products to accelerate time-to-market for new products.

The companies will target competitive local exchange carriers and wireless communications providers, carriers that will be more "aggressive in deploying new technology" and that lack the resources and time to merge solutions from different vendors on their own, according to Tony Surak, TTC's director of marketing.

"We want to take the burden of integration away from our carrier customers," Surak said. "In the past, this sort of work was done in-house by the carriers' own technical staffs. Now, the fastest-moving competitors don't have time to do that work in-house.

By integrating the TTC and Clear lines, carriers have the option of buying one single solution for testing and management instead of having to integrate two separate systems in-house, Surak said.

The first merged product from the two companies will blend the Clearview Network Window product family with TTC's Centest 650 Centralized Test System.

Telecom Technologies demonstrated its FASTest Automation System, an end-to-end network testing, verification and emulation platform that allows carriers to create, schedule, execute and verify large numbers of test cases in a short period of time. These tasks are performed in a visual environment - without programming - from a desktop.

The system's graphical user interface (GUI) allows carriers to test and verify multiple protocols simultaneously while they test features, applications and billing.

"FASTest leverages Advanced Intelligent Network concepts to provide a next generation testing solution, which is unique to the industry," said Hamid Ansari, chief operating officer of Telecom Technologies.

"With FASTest, network testing has entered a new dimension. Its programmability and scalable design provide an end-to-end test automation environment capable of emulating many network nodes and protocols simultaneously," he said.

No finger-pointing CLECs and other companies that resell network services will need to ensure that customer quality levels remain high, but few of them have the ability to test the networks they are reselling. A C7 monitoring system from CTel will provide carriers with call setup, call completion and traffic phase call quality.

The QualiView monitoring system, which is also used to verify call quality between international carriers, captures call setup and release information directly from the C7 protocol, enabling the system to generate answer-seizure ratios according to the desired format - by route, by country, by T-1 or E-1 line, or by the time slot within the T-1 or E-1 connection.

Identification of low answer-seizure ratios and failed time slots can help carriers optimize the use of their networks and yield a direct revenue gain, said Sam Carter, CTel's director of sales and marketing.

For interexchange carriers that resell service, the system can provide a method of verifying that they're getting what they're paying for, Carter said.

"IXCs know their own networks' infrastructures are problem-free and well-tested, but customer calls don't travel exclusively over one network anymore," Carter said. "With the QualiView system, the monitoring device can help carriers double-check each other. If you're an IXC, you can't pick up the phone and ask another IXC to address a problem unless you can pinpoint that they are the source of the problem.

Two other companies are exploring the idea of testing the testing systems. Tollgrade Communications and Encompass Software announced a set of products designed to verify that carrier testing equipment is providing accurate data and helping carriers to use their field resources more efficiently.

Tollgrade's TestDesk suite provides comprehensive support for screening telco test systems and allows testing results to be shared efficiently for customer service and training functions.

The product suite includes three components. WireChief verifies test system performance, performs database updates and recommends corrective actions automatically.

"WireChief lets service providers verify that alarms coming from network test equipment are real problems with the network and not failures in the test equipment," said Bob Collinson, principal of Encompass Software. Although alarms caused by such failures may account for only 2% of all alarms, that 2% adds up quickly - especially when carriers factor in the $120 to $200 cost of each trip technicians take to a remote site, he said.

The system conducts a series of transactions with test system components and customer line record inventory systems. This data enables WireChief to update test system databases continuously; automatically sample subscriber line testability at wire centers; isolate testing failures quickly and automatically; and sort failures into appropriate "dispatch in," "dispatch out" and "further analysis" categories.

The TestShare component of the suite expands on carriers' existing automated report handling systems to reduce the need for manual intervention. The third piece of the suite, HelpTest, is an automated, step-by-step training guide designed to help technicians maintain and repair digital loop carrier test systems.

Tollgrade also unveiled its Slash 2400 time slot access bank, an add/drop channel bank unit that allows carriers to economically deploy services and conduct testing. The unit permits services to be added without the need for digital cross-connect systems or "hairpinning" arrangements in the central office. Among the cards that can be inserted into the device's 24 time slots is an alarm card that is included with the Slash 2400 device.

While these systems focus on the broader telecommunications market, other solutions target specific services and carrier situations that are gaining importance with the advent of competition.

Ellipsys Technologies is targeting frustrating, hard-to-analyze intermittent problems that often occur at the edges of the public and private network. The company's Call Problem Analysis solution tracks intermittent problems by capturing large amounts of data and applying analysis tools to the data to create a list of probable causes.

Isolating the sources of these errors can be difficult because their intermittent nature forces technicians to hunt for problems, which can lead to multiple service calls and corresponding costs to carriers. The Ellipsys unit provides full remote access and stand-alone operation through a standard modem and a personal computer. This allows large amounts of data - and, most likely, a recurrence of the intermittent error - to be captured without the need for on-site troubleshooting.

The solution uses a behavioral model instead of a physical model to analyze problems. The captured data is subjected to Ellipsys' analysis tools, which isolate the likely sources and identify the nature of the problem, then resolve the trouble by presenting detailed event information and analysis or instigating an automatic diagnostic routine.

New niches Motorola Semiconductor's target is the asymmetrical digital subscriber line (ADSL) market, and the company hopes that its CopperGold System Analyzer can provide carriers with the means to quickly test lines and roll out ADSL services more quickly.

The unit uses a PC-based application running on the Windows NT 4.0 operating system to display testing results. The CopperGold System Analyzer allows users to monitor and control the evaluation.

In addition, the analyzer can be used to create scripted system tests, including the control of an external line simulator. This enables carriers to automate their performance testing of the CopperGold System, which can save development time and resources and help get products to market faster.

"Today's telecommunications environment demands that telcos and [Internet service providers] be able to quickly bring new services to market," said Jim Odom, Motorola Semiconductor's manager of broadband operations. "Of course, this places challenges on the market's equipment vendors. Motorola recognizes the pressures our customers face each day, so we've developed tools such as the CopperGold System Analyzer to help reduce product development cycles, time-to-market and project risk.

Tektronix is moving to leverage its strengths in both the television and telecom industries with products focused on service providers that are offering broadcast-quality video services. This field could grow substantially as high-bandwidth transmission technologies become available. The company unveiled an option for its VM700T/A video measurement set that will give carriers a more precise method for measuring drift and drift rate of video signals on their Sonet and synchronous digital hierarchy distribution networks.

Option 22 for the VM700T/A is targeted at pinpointing horizontal sync timing wander, a phenomenon that causes little trouble for voice and data communications but can seriously mar high-quality video transmissions.

"Video services demand a more stringent level of timing and synchronization than other services," said Thomas Tucker, product marketing manager for TV test at Tektronix. "This option is meant to ensure that timing drift and drift rate are within acceptable limits as the signal exits the video codec.

While timing drift is an important measurement, drift rate is the key factor in ensuring proper video transmission, Tucker said. "If the drift rate is constant, that isn't a problem. It's those spots where the drift rate suddenly spikes that cause problems with video signals. The object is to make sure that packets aren't backing up and being dropped," he said.

Hewlett-Packard released a new series of test products specifically designed to allow carriers to keep a better eye on their cabling installations. An updated version of the HP 81700 Remote Fiber Test and Management System Series 200 introduces new hardware controllers based on the Pentium processor, a 16-bit interface for localization into a variety of foreign languages and updated software, including an Oracle database.

The system consists of a test system controller based around HP OpenView, multiple remote test units with optical time domain reflector (OTDR) capability, switch and communications modules, and a laptop for local control of remote units.

A new high-performance module for the E6000A mini-OTDR promises to allow fiber testing over greater distances and - over shorter distances - reduce testing times and costs for fiber networks. The new device can reduce speeds for tests over short distances from 180 seconds to 10 seconds.

HP also announced a real-time test solution to help manufacturers and service providers incorporate operations, administration and maintenance (OAM)-based capabilities into their asynchronous transfer mode networks and equipment.

The HP E6270A OAM protocol tester for the HP Broadband Series Test System ensures that the performance monitoring, in-service fault detection and fault localization functions of the OAM protocol are operating properly. OAM's in-service capabilities allow engineers and system managers to monitor and verify the health of network transmissions without the crippling downtimes and attendant costs of out-of-service methods.

The OAM protocol was developed to provide a standardized method to monitor and troubleshoot ATM network performance. Delivery of delay-sensitive payloads such as voice- and video-over-ATM networks requires carriers to meet quality of service parameters to ensure that customer applications function successfully.

All the OAM data generated by the unit for testing is accessible through a GUI designed to reduce the time, complexity and cost involved in OAM verification.

Easy as drag and drop TestMaster, a graphics-based network modeling tool from Teradyne, enables test engineers and equipment vendors to quickly develop standardized models for testing, cutting time to market for new network equipment. The system enables engineers to simulate systems through an easy-to-use GUI and then subject those models to a range of tests.

The drag-and-drop interface allows models of system behavior to be conducted quickly. These models become reusable databases for all possible test scenarios, according to Mark Myers, a member of Teradyne's Software and Systems Test Division. The software automatically generates test results and quickly produces reports.

Using the system to construct testing models can also help preserve the knowledge base within companies, Myers said.

"People use models, even if those models are stored in their heads. When someone retires or leaves the company, that model walks with him," he said. "Using this system allows any engineer to open up a tried and proven test model and apply it immediately without having to go through the learning process his predecessor went through.

An integration kit for TestMaster for the Hammer test system for computer telephony applications allows the system to generate test scripts that are automatically downloaded across the network in a compiled, ready-to-run condition.