General

They've Got The New Stuff Before We Do

Test equipment manufacturers are not famous for innovation, but perhaps they should be. Before anything reaches retail, it's tested in their labs. They get the new things before the rest of us.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [January 3, 2005]

London-based Spirent knows everybody. From SBC to the U.S. government to equipment providers like Cisco and Nortel, Spirent interacts with all the big players in the service provider industry. That's because the company makes test equipment.

It tests everything broadband, from SANs to wireless to voice to the latest routers. "We prefer to use the term IP telephony instead of VoIP because it includes non IP elements," explains Mark Fishburn, Spirent's vice president of technical strategy.

That clunky PSDN
To illustrate this, he launches a powerpoint slide that shows all the protocols a VoIP call might use in the real world, from plain old TCP/IP to SIP and MEGACO. The slide also mentions the PSDN.

We're all accustomed to talking about the Public Switched Telephone Network, but companies like Spirent earn their spurs by simulating the imperfect realities of the Public Switched Data Network.

Sometimes they simulate the PSDN of the future. "We did an interoperability test for Juniper and Cisco that made headlines because we ran 12 times the world's Internet traffic over the equipment in our labs," says Fishburn.

The company does interoperability testing, standards compliance, and protocol evaluation. "We need to have a product before the standard is ready," says Fishburn. "A standard cannot be a standard until it's tested, so if the ink is dry on a standard and we don't have a product, we've failed in that market."

Although it's based in the UK, the company does the majority of its business in North America (about 60 percent, Fishburn estimates). The company does about 15 percent of business in Europe, about 15 percent in Asia, and the remaining 10 percent in the rest of the world. Its biggest customer is SBC. Its fastest growing market is Asia.

The new, new market
For service providers in the U.S., the company is particularly involved in testing IPTV, IPv6, and IP telephony. IP Telephony, notes Fishburn, is affected by jitter and latency. If either occurs, subscribers can hear it. IPTV is not yet affected by latency because most of it is buffered, but he says that packet loss is clearly visible in a buffered video stream.

Fishburn is more optimistic about the future of IPv6 in the U.S. than most people we've talked to. He's counting on the U.S. Department of Defense to give it a big push with a $36 billion IT budget much of which, he claims, will be devoted to upgrading from IPv4 to IPv6.

He also thinks that there are markets far beyond television for IPTV. "Think enterprise education services. A company spends a lot of money to buy an education video, and then they have to distribute it. Often, they make physical copies, even though they're not supposed to." Digital delivery makes sense.

Whatever the year 2005 holds in store for us, whether it's multi-gigabit urban Ethernet or IPTV or IP telephony, it's likely Spirent will get to see it first. For example, if you want to simulate a DoS attack on your VoIP service, you now know whom to call.

—End