Test and Measurement
Why it’s not so simple to go from lab to live
By Iyad Salti, director of sales and business development - EMEA & APAC, Spirent
T
esting telecommunication network products and services used to be simpler. You could test individual technology silos - such as network voice - and go directly from the lab to the live environment with peace of mind that it would work there as it had done in the lab. Unfortunately, that process is no longer so linear.
With 5G, virtualisation, containerisation, and disaggregation, the telecommunications network has become far more complex and - following suit - so has testing.
Network technologies can no longer be siloed. Testing increasingly has to cover a wider and more complicated array of services. 5G network slicing - in which operators can dedicate a portion of a network to a specific
48 October 2023
use case - runs across the device, the Radio Access Network (RAN) and the core network, cutting across almost every node and domain. Furthermore, the significantly increased number of network functions and vendors leads to constant change which defines the modern telecommunications network. Therefore, testing must rise to these challenges, through sustainable automation frameworks, and by getting nearer to the live/production network with a continuous testing approach.
Testing can no longer be done in isolation. When deployed in a live environment, those technologies will be dealing with myriad variables, dependencies and changes which cannot be anticipated in the lab, no matter how thorough the testing.
Components in Electronics
How it all got so complex One of the reasons for this is a huge diversifying boom in telecommunications networks. Technologies are getting more complex; network architectures are opening and suppliers are diversifying. At the same time upgrade, maintenance and innovation cycles are getting shorter. This amounts to greater complexity within the network and ever more variables and unknowns to test against. In recent years, telecommunications has largely moved from purpose-built to cloud based architecture. Telecommunications networks are becoming widely geographically distributed, cloud-based and increasingly based on software stacks and virtualised across access, core, private and public clouds. As a result, network architectures are also
opening, widening the space for new vendors and technologies. As those new products and technologies have emerged, competitive market pressure to release and upgrade has followed. Previously, these cycles ran between three to six months and have since become a lot more in quantity and frequency to within much shorter cycles. Every time, any domain within this complex ecosystem of modern architectures gets changed, an e2e, isolated (nodal) and adjacency testing will be required. Doing this without proper automated and continuous testing is practically impossible jeopardising the evolution to a sustainably robust 5G network.
New concerns have also emerged. The network is handling more data and so the ability to scale has become even more
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