everything RF recently interviewed, Stephen Douglas, the Head of the 5G Practice at Spirent Communications to learn more about Spirent and their 5G plans. Stephen works for Spirent’s strategy organization helping define the technical direction, developing new innovative solutions, and market-leading disruptive technologies. Currently, Stephen leads Spirent’s strategic initiatives for 5G, IoT, and Automotive.
Q. Can you give us a brief history of Spirent Communications?
Stephen: Spirent is a leading global provider of automated test, assurance and cyber security solutions for the communications industry and ecosystem. Founded in 1936 in the UK as Bowthorpe Electric Company, the company was later renamed Spirent reflecting its culture of “inspired innovation” with a focus on high growth, cutting edge technology activities in the Information Communication and Technology sector (ICT).
To build on its leadership in Test and Assurance, Spirent acquired a number of leading communications test companies throughout the 1990’s and 2000’s including Telecom Analysis Systems, Global Simulation Systems, Adtech, Netcom Systems and Heikimian Laboratories. The majority of Spirent’s acquisitions were based in the United States where Spirent has established sizeable R&D facilities, while sales operations were also established in Europe and in Asia to support and expand the Group’s global activities.
Today, Spirent is listed on the UK Stock Market in the FTSE 250 index as SPT, and has over 1,400 employees, offices globally, and services a base of over 1,100 unique customers across the communication ecosystem with reported revenues of $503.6m (2019).
Q. What T&M products and services do you offer for the wireless industry? What sectors do you cater to?
Stephen: Spirent provides automated test and assurance solutions for the communications industry and in cybersecurity. We help our customers safely accelerate technology development in the lab, while ensuring new products and services continuously perform out in the real world.
With a focus on leading edge communications technologies, we pride ourselves on innovative products and services to support the growth of 5G and OpenRAN, SD-WAN, cloud & edge, WiFi 6, and connected autonomous vehicles to name a few. Our solutions focus on emulating and automating real-world communications systems, environments and traffic so customers can confidently assess their network’s or devices performance and security from development through to operation – safely accelerating time to market and ensuring flawless experiences.
Our Products/Solutions Include:
- Network Emulators & Traffic Generators for testing cellular and wifi communication Devices, Core and RAN Network Functions, Cloud Networks, Automotive Communications, GNSS, High Speed Ethernet Transport networks, Quality of Service/Experience and Cybersecurity efficacy.
- Key products/solutions include: LANDSLIDE (for Core networks); STC (for HSE Transport networks and Public/Private Clouds), VERTEX (for Radio networks); 8100 (For Devices); CyberFlood (for Security).
- Automation software and services for automating labs and test bed environments, the testing process, fulfilment operations (i.e. service activation) and DevOps Continuous Testing pipelines.
- Key products/solutions include: VELOCITY (for lab and testbed automation); ITEST (for test automation); VISIONWORKS (for fulfilment automation of Transport, SD-WAN and Core Network services).
- Field test solutions for seamless lab to field testing of User, Device, Network performance and experience.
- Key products/solutions include: UMETRIX (for users/device service experience); FIT4LAUNCH (for benchmarking and drive testing); VISIONWORKS (for site/function turn-up validation).
- Service Assurance solutions for proactive monitoring (active testing), fault isolation and re-validation of communication networks and services.
- Key products/solutions include: VISIONWORKS (for Active Assurance).
Our Services Offerings Include:
- Managed Solutions performing strategic operational functions for customers:
- Lab as a Service
- Test as a Service
- Certification as a Service
- Deployment as a Service
- Product Services enabling customers to realize optimal use of Spirent products:
- Implementation & Integration
- Product Training
- Resident Engineers
- Product Support
- Consulting Services supporting custom projects, helping customers with specific strategies and objectives:
- Assessments & strategy
- Planning & design
- Network architecture & engineering
- Test methodologies
The Sectors Spirent Caters to:
- Communication Service Providers (CSPs) preparing, launching and running communications networks and services.
- Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs) developing and supplying network equipment (i.e. Radio, Core, Transport)
- Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) developing smartphones, IoT devices and device components (i.e. chipsets, modules and antennas).
- Military & Government utilizing communication technology for enhanced defense and security solutions.
- Industry and Enterprises looking to leverage cellular, Wifi or cloud networks as part of their digital strategy.
- Space industry developing innovative solutions for ubiquitous coverage.
- Academia researching future communications and working across the public and private sectors.
Q. Can you tell us more about your products and solutions for 5G Testing?
Stephen: Spirent provides the industry’s only end-to-end 5G ecosystem testing solutions through a broad portfolio, enabling customers to achieve faster-time-to market and superior quality. The breadth of our domain coverage uniquely gives us unparalleled insight and subject matter expertise from working across the end-to-end 5G ecosystem and bridging the divide between development and operations
Our 5G Offerings Include:
- 5G Research
- Spirent Digital Twin is a 5G “network in a box” - it’s an emulation sandbox of the 5G network providing customers with a cost efficient, highly flexible and repeatable environment to accelerate their research and innovation around 5G.
- 5G Continuous Testing
- Spirent Test as a Service (TaaS) is a continuous testing environment that efficiently validates multi-vendor 5G Core releases and efficacy, accelerating time to market and delivered as a managed service.
- Spirent Velocity & iTest work seamlessly together to create an autonomous lab and test management platform that provides a complete, differentiated Lab-as-a-Service solution.
- 5G Network Test & Validation
- Spirent Test Center (STC) and CloudSure provides an end-to-end test solution for cloud and virtual network environments, validating the critical multi-vendor and multi-distribution virtual infrastructure and transport networks for 5G Cloud RAN, edge, new core and web-scale distributed data centers.
- Spirent Landslide emulates 5G devices, user traffic, and core network functions to test the core network’s evolution to support 5G and deliver new capabilities such as New Radio interoperability and network slicing.
- Spirent Cyberflood, & Security Labs continuously test and audit the 5G environment to pre-emptively identify vulnerabilities and prioritize risk mitigation.
- 5G Radio & Device Testing
- Spirent's 8100 5G system provides performance and carrier acceptance testing of the new 5G mobile devices and chipsets going beyond simple conformance tests to address stringent operator and industry vertical specific performance test areas.
- Spirent Vertex Channel Emulator supports applications from SISO to high-density massive MIMO applications, new RAN technologies such as beamforming, and new frequencies such as mmWave to enable the streamlined prototyping and testing of 5G new radio.
- 5G Service Assurance & Fulfilment
- Spirent VisionWorks (Active Assurance) provides active testing and monitoring of 5G networks and devices. From design in the lab to testing, onboarding, deployment and maintenance, Spirent assures connections at every point to enable higher quality of service. VisionWorks completely automates the testing processes such as verification of end-user service quality and isolation of problems to a specific network segment. VisionWorks provides intelligent and automated active test and assurance across the lifecycle of the evolving 4G/5G hybrid network to enable service agility, cost reductions, network efficiencies, and increased revenues.
- 5G User Experience
Q. How is 5G Testing different from testing for other wireless technologies like 4G/LTE?
Stephen: 5G introduces more complexity than any previous generation of cellular technology. This is in large part due to the use of new radio technologies like M-MIMO and beamforming, as well as multiple new frequencies in previously believed unusable ranges, the move to cloud native and dependency on network functions virtualization (NFV), new disaggregated deployment architectures and numerous new capabilities including network slicing.
These new technology changes are compounded with a desire to simultaneously service multiple different industries (all with different network performance requirements), provide new levels of network and service flexibility to replicate the agility that hyper-scalers have shown, and handle the continued threat of cyber security risks.
This has caused an industry sea change in how testing needs to be done and the types of solutions required. Over-the-Air (OTA) testing for example, is now table stakes for testing 5G New Radio.
Instead, the communications industry must look to continuous testing integrated into the DevOps pipeline processes to realize agility and deal with the continuous release nature of software from multiple vendors. Additionally, cloud native test solutions are paramount for testing the new network architectures and offering efficient consumption models.
Testing as a Service is becoming a defacto engagement model as the industry looks for cross domain subject matter experts and partners to handle the complexity of testing as a managed service. Active testing using synthetic traffic injected into an operational environment is also becoming crucial to proactively monitor, isolate and revalidate performance and security in elastic networks.
To support this, automation has become more important and is required as a holistic capability consumed across the lifecycle to simplify labs, tests and operational processes such as fulfilment. Finally, network and traffic emulation is evolving to become Digital Twins accelerating research and feed development within adjacent industries. The fact is traditional test and measurement is evolving to become continuous test and assurance, and Spirent is leading this sea change.
Q. With so many different frequency bands in play in different countries, what is your approach to developing testing solutions for 5G? Are you focusing on specific countries or regions?
Stephen: Our solutions are designed flexibly to support multiple frequency ranges out of the box, and can be easily upgraded in the field to support additional frequency ranges as they become available.
We have two primary solutions where 5G frequency ranges are applicable:
- Our 5G Channel Emulator (VERTEX including High Frequency Convertor) supports frequencies from 30MHz to 40.5GHz. This covers the most common frequency ranges including:
- 30 to 5925 MHz
- 5.9 to 10 GHz
- 9 to 13 GHz
- 24.25 to 29.5 GHz
- 27.5 to 28.5 GHz
- 37 to 40.5 GHz
- Our 5G Device test system (8100 5G) supports an upgradable Software Defined Radio and currently supports sub-6GHz frequency ranges for:
- All applicable FR1 TDD NR bands validated with n41, n77, n78, n79
- All applicable bi-directional FR1 FDD NR bands validated with n5, n66, n71
Q. What are some of the most common challenges that your customers are facing when deploying 5G technology? How are you helping them overcome this?
Stephen: Our customer range across the complete 5G ecosystem from OEM/ODMs, NEMs to CSPs and we see 4 common macro level challenges they face:
- Complexity of the new technology
- This is creating a steep learning curve with new operational processes, performance considerations and security implications.
- The complexity of New Radio and the lack of maturity in NFV and cloud native are seen as the biggest technical challenges.
- Time to market
- The global market acceleration has put pressure on supply chains and product quality as traditional R&D cycles have condensed, risking product stability, performance and security.
- 5G standards are still evolving with iterative releases, gradually adding more functionality demanding high flexibility and deployment agility to reap time to market benefits and avoid costly upgrades.
- Cost
- Carriers have considerable new investment overheads for spectrum, fiber, cell sites and edge data center build outs. This is compounded by the need to still spend heavily on 4G as they reinforce the underlay coverage network.
- This is putting pressure on CSPs to look for cost cutting measures across their business.
- Revenue realization
- The business case and ROI is still unproven in many markets and early 5G offerings to consumers have shown only small ARPU increases.
- Carriers are under pressure to both maintain (protect) their consumer market and open up new long-term revenue streams in non-traditional but lucrative enterprise and industrial markets.
Spirent helps our customers deal with these challenges by:
- Reducing the complexity and economics of testing and validating 5G through leading-edge network emulation and automation solutions. Our customers have achieved >50% reduction in Lab and Test costs.
- Safely accelerating 5G innovation and time to market through Dev to Ops continuous testing and cybersecurity assessments. Our customers have seen 10X acceleration in time-to-market for 5G products which translates from months to weeks.
- Assuring 5G continuously delivers the new experiences and revenues through pro active service assurance solutions. Our customers have benefited from millions of dollars in operational savings and increases in customer experience and loyalty.
With over 100 unique 5G customers, Spirent is a proven 5G partner to leading Tier-1 service providers, and network and device vendors. Don’t just take our word for it: Leading Lights recognized Spirent as the 2019 Outstanding Test & Measurement Vendor for our 5G leadership. We are also widely recognized as industry leader (#1) for 5G Core Network Test and Emulation and 5G High Speed Ethernet (HSE) Transport test solutions.
Q. Can you tell us more about the Network Digital Twin Approach to Testing?
Stephen: The 5G Network Digital Twin is an emulated version of the 5G Network (or key functions) which can be used as a test bed / sandbox, giving customers flexible control while avoiding the need for spectrum or access to real networks and equipment. It provides a cost efficient, flexible and repeatable environment to accelerate our customers’ research and innovation around 5G.
Network Digital Twin can operate standalone as an emulated environment, or it can be integrated with actual networks and equipment. It can also be stimulated with emulated traffic/impairment generation or real-world record and play-back.
Finally, this testing approach can be used for researching the communications network or it can be integrated with third party environments and other Digital Twins (i.e. automotive simulators, industrial process simulators) as a “Network in the Loop,” to allow these environments to be augmented with a 5G communications network.
Q. What are the security risks that Equipment Manufacturers are Service Providers should be aware of when using 5G Technology? Do you have any solutions to help identify these risks?
Stephen: The move to 5G and cloudification of the network vastly expands potential attack surfaces for hackers. We recommend a proactive, continuous approach to assessing security so vulnerabilities can be detected and addressed before hackers discover them. Continuous security testing must operate across the network lifecycle as solutions are developed, deployed and operated.
Spirent’s Security Solutions (SecurityLabs/CyberFlood DBA) address key service provider and network/device vendors’ needs such as:
- Realistic testing of security performance and efficacy to reduce risks and costs;
- Continuous auditing of security in both the lab and live networks to harden resilience and reduce compromises; and
- Supply chain security challenges that have emerged due to the rapid growth and diversity of the 5G supply chain. It allows suppliers and service providers to proactively mitigate risks, enhance delivery efficiency, reduce costs/penalties and increase confidence and trust.
Spirent also enables our customers to make 5G security a differentiator – rather than an inhibitor – that enables innovation. Our customers can innovate with intention by continuously wargaming their network using our security emulation solutions to discover how security can be used as a value generating asset through increased agility, offering enhanced resilience, providing new trust models and enabling new revenue streams.
Q. Can you tell us more about "5G Testing as a service"? What does it include and how does it work?
Stephen: Test as a Service is a unique solution in the market, helping build supply-chain stakeholder confidence by continuously validating the multi-vendor software for agile consumption by the service providers and delivered as a managed service.
Today telco and cloud networks are in constant flux with operational risk heightening as networks are virtualized and moved to the cloud. Increased complexity of the network, along with velocity and volume of software releases and suppliers, presents serious challenges. As lab validation times expand, inconsistent tools and methodologies hamper efficiencies. This is compounded as development to operations processes slow impacting network on-boarding and activation times
Spirent’s Managed Solutions portfolio including Test as a Service (TaaS) aims to bridge the uncertainty gap to help organizations deliver on their business promises by performing strategic operational functions for customers, acting as a vendor neutral partner thus shielding them from the costs, complexity and overheads of safely bringing networks and services to market.
The TaaS solution is a unique approach to comprehensive testing, validation and assurance for increasingly complex and virtualized, next-gen environments. The methodology covers two key dimensions: the end-to-end lifecycle and the stack. The TaaS solution addresses the rich complexities with standard and customized automated test suites, supporting high-frequency release cycles, ensuring quality of all elements in the environment. The solution provides the full scope of testing required for complex deployment challenges including: cloud, 5G core validation, SD-WAN, and more. With Spirent TaaS, customers accelerate time to market with confidence, assuring quality, increased productivity, and realizing substantial savings in Opex expenditures.
Q. Has the COVID-19 pandemic had any impact on business for Spirent Communications? Has this pandemic changed anything in terms of product launches or strategy?
Stephen: Our product launches and frequency remain unimpacted by the onset of COVID-19.
However, one change we have witnessed from our customers is increased demand for our automation solutions around labs, testing and fulfilment/assurance operational processes, as they look to enable more work from home capabilities, drive cost efficiencies across their operating models and gain a competitive edge through agility.
Q. What is Spirent Communications 5G Roadmap for product development and solutions for the years to come?
Stephen: Spirent’s focus is on being at the leading edge of technology innovation and our 5G roadmap plans reflect this as we support ongoing 3GPP releases, the continued capacity growth of our transport networks to 800G and beyond, the evolution to Open and Virtual RAN, the move to cloud native and microservices architectures and support the adoption of 5G by new industries including automotive C-V2X, industrial private networks, military secure networks and non-terrestrial networks to name a few.
Intelligent automation is at the heart of our plans and we will continue to lead and support the communications industry as it moves to an agile and elastic network with our continuous testing and active assurance solutions as they become consumable across all types of networks and technology architectures.
Q. The Rollout of 5G has effectively started this year, by when do you feel the rollout will be complete and it will become the primary wireless technology in use?
Stephen: We see the 5G rollout in two different ways. One is about providing coverage and the second is about providing capabilities.
National coverage by carrier networks will take another 2-5 years, depending on carrier/market maturity, and as auctions take place, cell sites are upgraded, and new sites are commissioned. Additional coverage will be incrementally added for private networks and densifications. This will be ongoing throughout the next decade.
On the other hand, capabilities will be an iterative upgrade process over the next 10 years, as potentially 4 more 3GPP standards releases build on the currently released 16 5G standard. These incremental releases will bring new capabilities required for the 5G network to service the use cases of enterprise and industry. For example, in automotive we do not expect to see mainstream in-vehicle deployments of 5G C-V2X until at least 2024, due to dependencies on 3GPP standards releases, national coverage requirements and chipset/module availability.
Q. Can you tell us more about your products and solutions for the PNT/Positioning Industry?
Stephen: Spirent is the market leader in PNT test and simulation solutions and trusted partner of the world’s leading PNT developers in military and defense, space, automotive, chipsets and handsets.
Spirent provides the industry’s broadest and technically deepest portfolio of PNT test methodologies, including test and simulation instruments that can emulate all PNT signals with high fidelity and control and professional services who can guide, interpret and, if required, do the testing for you.
Our unique value is that we derive all our PNT signals from first principles, giving users total control of a comprehensive and high-fidelity synthetic environment.
Our rich portfolio includes:
- GNSS Simulators
- Multi-frequency and multi-GNSS constellation simulators for GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou, QZSS, SBAS and NavIC.
- GNSS signal and interference generators for multi-GNSS constellation signals.
- GNSS wavefront simulator for radiated and conducted wavefront testing.
- GNSS Ground-Based Augmentation Landing System (GBAS) VHF Data Broadcast (VDB) simulator.
- PNT Record & Playback
- Record and playback system enabling high-fidelity testing using captured real-world signals in repeatable lab conditions. Supporting GNSS L1/L2/L5/B3/E6.
- GNSS Testing Tools & Software
- Simulation software for creating a vast range of signals, effects, error models, trajectories.
- 3D environments for multipath and obscuration testing
- Integrated HIL testing software
- Simulation software for emulating inertial sensor outputs at the same time as GNSS RF signals for testing the performance of integrated GNSS/inertial systems.
- PNT vulnerability test software enabling you to simulate complex spoofing environments, multi-directional jamming attacks and interference scenarios.
- PNT automation software enabling complex GNSS performance and vulnerabilities testing at a single click.
Q. Can you also tell us about Spirent Federal Systems? What is the relationship between Spirent Communications and Spirent Federal Systems?
Stephen: Spirent Federal Systems is a proxy company of Spirent Communications established to offer Spirent’s world leading GPS and GNSS test and simulation equipment for U.S. Government customers and prime contractors. As an accredited U.S. Federal supplier, Spirent Federal Systems meets the stringent requirements to deliver GPS test systems supporting encrypted military codes.
About Stephen Douglas
With over 20 years’ experience in telecommunications, Stephen has been at the cutting edge of next-generation technologies and has worked across the industry with service providers, start-ups, and network equipment manufacturers, helping them drive innovation and transformation. Stephen is an ardent believer in connected technology and strives to challenge, blur, and break down the silos that prevent innovation and business success.
