Agilent has supplied leading-edge measurement products and services to the communications industry for more than 60 years, across the complete lifecycles of many generations of technology.

Agilent has been at the forefront of UMTS measurement technology with instruments for R&D, manufacturing, network deployment and network optimization. Now we are applying our UMTS expertise to evolve and enhance the capabilities of our proven GSM and GPRS OSS solutions.

Figure 9.

Agilent's solutions for UMTS network build out and trials include:

Protocol and Signaling Analyzers

With UMTS greatly increasing the complexity of mobile networks, it's no longer enough for a protocol tester to be able to pinpoint a signaling issue to solve a problem. Agilent's analyzers provide unrivalled measurement capabilities from the UTRAN to the core. They provide lower layer protocol analysis and higher level signaling analysis in an easy-to-use, flexible package.

Voice quality testers

Agilent's Voice Quality Analysis solutions perform passive or active voice quality analysis in circuit-switched and packet-switched networks to help ensure quality remains high.

Drive test tools

Agilent's attended and unattended drive-test systems give you the comprehensive phone and digital receiver measurements required to optimize your network and quickly solve RF problems.

Data service assurance

The Data Service Assurance active test and drill-down troubleshooting capabilities provide much-needed help in establishing service quality measurement base lines and resolving network and performance problems.

Consisting of drive test tools, data sequencing, active tests and analysis software this solution gives your RF and optimization engineers insight into the network's end-to-end quality of service-from the subscriber's perspective. RF, user application, and IP core measurements are integrated and results are presented through a single user interface for analysis and reporting.

Launching services

Once your UMTS network becomes stable, you need to test service performance to ensure successful take-up by early adopters. Agilent's Wireless QoS Manager provides real-time active testing of critical services-as seen from the end-user perspective.

Agilent's solutions for UMTS service launch and growth include:

Overall Service Management

To manage your entire service operations with maximum efficiency, Agilent's Wireless Service Manager aggregates and consolidates data from multiple sources-including UMTS and 2/2.5G components-into a single, intelligent dashboard view of current service quality, with drill down into detailed network and service views. This provides service status information to enable you to isolate and prioritize the resolution of those service problems that have the greatest impact on subscribers and ultimately on your business.

Service-specific Testing

As services achieve mass-market appeal and their take-up accelerates, active testing with Wireless QoS Manager lets you proactively validate service operation from different remote locations. This provides the key performance and quality indicators (KPIs/KQIs) to ensure that quality is maintained end-to-end.

Service Monitoring Solutions

For ongoing network and service troubleshooting, Agilent's solutions extract signaling and user-data messages from key UMTS, GPRS and GSM interfaces to feed call trace and protocol analysis applications, allowing you to rapidly diagnose and pinpoint faults.

For real-time surveillance, Agilent's QoS Analyzer features a rich set of key performance metrics relating to the network, services and customers. These metrics are used for real-time or historical analysis, trending, base-lining and SLA tracking. QoS Analyzer can integrate with the troubleshooting applications to provide detailed diagnostics on the affected service and the impact to customers.

Business customers use roaming services to transact business on the move. The Agilent Roaming Management System provides you with a real-time picture of service quality as experienced by roamers in your network or as experienced by your customers when they roam internationally.

To resolve customer service calls with greater efficiency, Agilent's Session Analyzer gathers together signaling information (such as connection, mobility, and user authentication), and service data relating to a specific call. The information is summarized in an easy-to-use format, enabling less skilled users to perform basic troubleshooting, or to route calls to the appropriate team.