What’s ahead for networks in 2020? From InfoVista’s perspective, some of the important steps forward will be to bring 5G indoor/outdoor planning capabilities together in an integrated fashion, and giving vertical-specific customers such as automotive manufacturers a better view on how wireless network performance is impacting their applications.
InfoVista’s Chief Product and Marketing Officer Mike Wilkinson said that the company has more than 130 customers in 49 countries using its 5G solutions already. In a recent interview with RCR Wireless News, he talked about InfoVista’s areas of focus in the coming year as 5G deployments ramp up and wireless connectivity becomes ever more important to various industry verticals.
As a leader in outdoor network planning, he said, InfoVista took stock of how 5G is being delivered to high-profile venues such as stadiums and looked at how it could proceed with an offering that integrated indoor 5G planning as well, and decided that a partnership with indoor planning company iBwave was the best way forward. Now, Wilkinson said, InfoVista has a joint sales and marketing and development plan with iBwave, focused on delivering 5G planning tools that can handle outdoor, campus and indoor planning. That’s particularly important with major large events coming up, such as the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, where 5G capabilities are expected to be showcased along with the athletic competitions.
Wilkinson also discussed InfoVista’s use of its TEMS portfolio for network testing, to adapt to the needs of specific verticals which are beginning to require greater visibility into the wireless networks which carry their applications and traffic from connected devices and things. In particular, he said, InfoVista has dropped some of its capabilities into vehicle telecom modules, to allow car manufacturers to get a better sense of the performance of carrier networks to which their vehicles are connected, and how that performance changed by location and time.
“It’s super, super high-quality data that they get access to, so they can start to see the performance of networks as the cars move around a domestic market,” Wilkinson said. “Why is that important? Well, you then start to understand how the applications in next-generation car systems are going to behave in various areas.” That could impact whether a music streaming app can get sufficient bandwidth at 4 p.m. on a major highway to continue playing or whether it needs to adjust its data downloading to avoid buffering while in network brown-out spots.
InfoVista is taking that same functionality and applying it to other verticals and private networks, Wilkinson added. He said that two of those are mining and ports, where there may be automated vehicles operating within the reach of a private LTE network where there is a need for good performance visibility.
Two other areas that InfoVista is focused on in 2020 includes an updated voice quality assessment tool similar to POLQA, called sQLEAR, which stands for Speech Quality by machine LEARning; and extending its service assurance capabilities into the SD-WAN world, to enable better understanding of whether network problems lie in the physical network infrastructure or the software-defined network overlay.
Watch the full interview with Wilkinson below:
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