Demand grows for multiple-services testing

Total market revenue for the global integrated triple-play test-equipment market from 2006 to 2013.

There is a prevailing trend in the telecommunications industry to offer VoIP, data, and IPTV services over a single converged network. The integrated triple-play test-equipment market registered revenues of $121.1 million in 2007—an increase of 32.1% from 2006. Revenues will likely reach more than $1 billion in 2014 at a compound annual growth rate of 36.0% from 2007 to 2014 (figure).

Triple-play networks must support multiple technologies as well as a variety of standards and protocols. There are currently five VoIP protocols in use and three different ways to deploy IPTV and VoD (video on demand).

Successful test equipment will likely test new network elements entirely to ensure that they will work as designed. A monitoring system must be capable of capturing and decoding media and signaling information, which means it must also support a wide range of technologies, protocols, and standards.

The main challenge for a service provider is getting breadth of coverage by having all multiplay services in place. Test-equipment vendors have to pay careful attention to the industry in order to offer cutting-edge test and monitoring systems that fulfill the end users’ needs.

Network optimization also challenges service providers. Network operators must optimize their networks to handle new services and applications that impact the bandwidth, routing, and traffic flows. With IP video services such as IPTV and VoD, the need to understand the real-time performance of a network increases. Operators try to fully optimize their networks in order to reduce unnecessary capital expenditures and save money, but the lack of appropriate network optimization tools is a current challenge.

Consolidation remains a challenge to the growth of the integrated triple-play test-equipment market. As the telecommunications industry continues to consolidate, test-equipment vendors have fewer companies available with which to do business. Major test-equipment vendors such as Spirent Communications, Ixia, and Tektronix continue to overcome this problem by developing business relationships and consistently supplying high-quality test and monitoring equipment.

With the introduction of converged networks offering multimedia services, network operators can no longer afford to monitor the quality of their network alone, instead, they must monitor the end-to-end quality of the service and the quality of their end users’ experience.