Getting a head start for LTE

Capitalizing on its expertise in mobile technologies acquired across multiple generations for more than a decade, Astellia’s LTE Monitoring Solution is aimed at helping operators to make LTE a reality. As for the 3 previous generations, Astellia proposes a range of dedicated solutions to help operators to meet this new challenge of providing top quality service with LTE. Its LTE Monitoring Solution provides invaluable help to assess the network performances, benchmark equipment and terminals and carry out in-depth investigation of network behaviour at this early stage of LTE’s lifecycle. Astellia’s LTE solution consists of features such as eRAN monitoring capabilities on S1 and X2 interfaces as well as User Plane analysis with PSM (Packet Service Monitoring).

Astellia has proved the efficiency of its LTE solution while participating in various pilots and trials with Middle Eastern and European operators using several equipment vendors. During these trials Astellia was able to validate LTE performances with operators, measuring data throughputs over 100Mbps.

“As only a few LTE networks are commercially live, most operators today are running trials, pilots or limited deployments. For this reason we have put the focus on analysis capabilities, benchmarking and investigation for these first releases,” says Bertrand Mizzi, Innovation Manager at Astellia “Since LTE is a pure Mobile Broadband technology, we have brought all our data traffic expertise to our LTE Solution with in-depth packet data analysis capabilities to measure service efficiency carried by this new technology. Operators however must keep in mind that LTE remains a wireless technology and they will be facing radio issues similar to what is being experienced in 2G and 3G if not more. In particular, the necessity to deploy LTE in overlay with 2G/3G networks, along with serious spectrum constraints means that operators will have to focus on optimization from day one.”