When it comes to testing products in their labs for qualification, selection and pre-deployment purposes, to whom does Verizon turn? One answer is upstart Mu Dynamics, which provides testing systems primarily to operators, but also to their equipment suppliers.

Testing Requirements

The intra- and inter-lab testing at or between Verizon, BT, China Mobile, the UNH-Interoperability Lab and the National Communications System facility focused on the maturity of specs for voice, data and video services over IP. With countless standards already on the books, testing the implementation of them in products for use in practical situations is paramount.

Challenges

Until interoperability is achieved, service providers will not be able to provide truly seamless, blended IP services to support longstanding three-screen video pledges. Add-ons to standards, a critical area for testing, are sore spots with those trying to advance IMS’ adoption and bring services including, but not limited to, IPTV over a single core in a seamless manner.

Solution

Our products are used in product selection, remediation and tuning.   Mu Dynamics also does load and performance testing, which becomes increasingly important as services become more complex.

Results

It’s important not to lose sight that lab testing is much more than just attempting to connect devices and networks to see to what extent they do and don’t interoperate. Testing them in practical network scenarios is the only way to understand what will happen in real production networks. While rigorous testing raises at least as many questions as it answers, all forms of testing are crucial to the development of truly converged services.