Acterna claims leadership in handheld test market, signs Looking Glass

Based on its delivery of 3000 handheld service testers over the last six months to more than six Tier 1 carriers, Germantown, Md.-based Acterna has laid claim to the leadership in handheld test equipment. Spurring demand is Acterna's HST-3000 IP Video test suite, which the company said is the first designed specifically for the rollout of IP video service.

The Acterna HST-3000 is a modular, hand-held test tool that addresses a wide range of access network technology testing needs from the physical layer to the application layer. The new test IP video suite provides an all-in-one test tool for field technicians working installation and maintenance on networks delivering the triple-play services of voice, video and data.

"The HST product has grown several hundred percent this year over last and we have taken significant market share as a result," said Jerry Gentile, general manager for Acterna's telecommunication field services at Acterna.

The Acterna HST-3000 IP Video test suite provides set-top box emulation, including signaling for both broadcast video (IGMP) and Video-on-Demand (RTSP). It performs detailed analysis of the video transport stream, including PID discovery, packet loss and jitter, and enables PCR jitter analysis.

"There has been a lot of dabbling in the lab, but now video is prime time in a number of hotspots. It kind of hit the field operations groups like a tsunami," Gentile said. "We have been fortunate to be at the right place at the right time with the right product for them."

Both an Ethernet interface and an ADSL interface provide access to the test tool. It comes with an ADSl2+ option that provides ATU-R emulation that supports ADSL1, ADSL2 and ADSL2+ in one module. ADSL2 is key to enabling new voice, data and video over copper access networks.

Acterna hopes to consume the better part of what Multimedia Research Group said will be an IPTV services market worth $25.3 million by 2008. It is $1.9 million today.

Acterna also announced this week that Looking Glass Networks, a facilities-based provider of metropolitan data transport services, chose its Transport Module to ensure the reliable delivery of its high-bandwidth 10Gb/s services.

"This is a good example of us getting our product on the street just as there is demand," Gentile said.

Looking Glass offers custom design and build services for specific campus or data center requirements in large metro areas including: Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, the New York/New Jersey area, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia.

The Transport Module works in Acterna's T-BERD and MTS-8000 platforms. It is the industry's first integrated field solution for Ethernet, SONET, SDH, PDH and T-carrier networks. The module was first introduced this month at CeBIT 2005 in Hannover, Germany, and OFC/NFOEC 2005 in Anaheim, California.

Looking Glass will use Acterna's to more efficiently deploy its 10Gbps and SONET/SDH services, to scale it and to integrate them with other services and service providers. The test module also will be used to diagnose service level issues on live services.

Acterna's T-BERD/MTS-8000 is a scalable field platform for provisioning and maintaining short-haul, long-haul, FTTx, Metro, CWDM, transport, data and DWDM networks. It can integrate options for video microscope, VFL, light source and power meter, as well as an optical talk set with application modules for SONET, SDH, Ethernet, multi-mode and single mode OTDRs, PMD, spectral attenuation, CD, WDM, and single-port and dual-port OSA.