As broadband becomes the premier service delivery platform of the 21st century with over 700 million subscribers worldwide, testing of broadband networks has never been more important to ensure the quality of customer experience and reduce service calls. With devices becoming more mobile and cloud dependent and testing today’s broadband networks becoming increasingly complex, QA Cafe IP Test Solutions has announced a new era in testing of broadband networks with the release of its CDRouter Live, ahead of this month’s Broadband World Forum (21-23 October, Amsterdam).
A change in paradigm from traditional isolated laboratory testing, CDRouter Live lets vendors, providers, and their QA teams perform real-world, end-to-end testing of broadband devices in a live network.
“The reality is that laboratory testing will only go so far,” said Joe McEachern, CEO of QA Cafe. “There comes a time when you need to connect to your production network to find out how it’s really going to work for your customers. However, vendors and providers still want the control and automation of a lab environment when testing in a live network.”
The release of CDRouter Live is the latest achievement for QA Cafe, creator of the already popular CDRouter test platform, which has become the de-facto industry standard test platform for broadband devices.
“Chipset, OEM, and device vendors, plus service providers and their QA teams, use CDRouter every day to qualify their broadband networking equipment,” said McEachern. “It really has become the industry standard - our customers use CDRouter’s thousands of automated test reporting tools to demonstrate the quality of their products to themselves and their customers. CDRouter Live not only lets them test their device in a complete broadband network, but also addresses new environments that have not been testable before for end-to-end protocol functionality.”
These new environments are where CDRouter Live shines. For the new set of virtual devices that move some functionality out of the subscriber’s home and into the provider’s network, CDRouter Live lets users test both the subscriber devices and the virtual services they utilize. For devices that are cloud managed, or require access to dashboard software or other network services, CDRouter Live allows these devices to be connected to the resources they need in order to operate while being tested. Lastly, for mobile devices that require unique or expensive infrastructure in order to be tested properly, CDRouter Live enables the testing of these devices on the LTE or satellite links that are actually used in the real world.
“All in all, it’s an exciting time to be in the broadband industry,” said McEachern. “We hope our customers can take this new paradigm of testing and use it to bring their products to the next level of quality required for today’s demanding broadband world.”
