Spirent Communications

HGI Selects Spirent for Multiplay QoS Testing of Home Gateways

News Release from: Spirent Communications
24/09/2009

Spirent Communications plc today announced that it is providing the test infrastructure for the Home Gateway Initiative Test Event that will establish Quality of Service metrics and help demonstrate the ability of home gateways to deliver end-to-end QoS for multiplay managed services. A telecom operator led open forum committed to releasing specification for home gateways, HGI is using Spirent TestCenter to assure service providers that the home gateway vendors selected are in compliance with HGI's quality metrics for broadband services.

“With service providers increasingly offering managed multiplay services such as video on demand, multiplayer games and other interactive applications, QoS has to take an end-to-end view that invariably involves the home gateway and in-home networks,” said Duncan Bees, chief technology and business officer, HGI. “Spirent TestCenter, a solution recognized for its accurate user emulation of end user traffic even at high load, provides us the capability of assessing if vendors are able to deliver the QoS needed to support differentiated business and residential services.”

Spirent will enable HGI to determine the mean performances of home gateways in specific configurations and conditions. In particular, Spirent TestCenter will measure throughput and latency for different Ethernet-based WAN and LAN configurations.

“Spirent has a history of establishing test standards and benchmarks and is honored to be selected by HGI for multiplay QoS test specification” said David Hill, vice president of sales, EMEA, Spirent “Spirent TestCenter’s ability to measure enhanced realism for multiplay services, and test individual elements as well as end-to-end solutions enables customers to thoroughly assess network devices not just for uptime but for service quality of experience.”

This HGI Test Event will help build upon the QoS architecture described in the recently published QoS White Paper. Furthermore the test will identify HGI-GD013-R2 and HGI’s requirements for multiple flows, currently an HGI working draft document (HGI-RWD010-R3). In doing so, home gateway vendors will be able to assess QoS and multi-session support in both the product and reference designs. The test event will be held September 28 - October 2 at Orange Telecom’s Lab in Lannion, France.