The mobile industry has already begun to move away from the device based, closed-off test equipment in favour of software and connected tools.
According to Heavy Reading's report Mobile Network Outages & Service Degradations, the majority of the subset of survey respondents whose companies are currently offering VoLTE service reported that VoLTE client in the device is the most often cause of degradation in VoLTE service performance.
The VoLTE Parametrization Challenge
GSMA IR.92 specification defines optional behaviours in the VoLTE service, this issue doesn't allow operators to put in place a smooth VoLTE approach. From an OEM/Chipset vendor point of view, each VoLTE device manages a different VoLTE client version and also a different set of parameters to configure the client.
By combining the number of devices and clients, test automation with devices becomes a non-scalable approach due to the long list elements that required to be supported.
Apart from the scalability issue, that was explaining in the previous article, a monitoring system based on smartphones becomes a non-justifiable business solution due to the increasing amount of software releases that OEM/Chipset vendors are providing, which requires continuous upgrades of the devices used for testing the service. This software upgrade process requires to be performed locally device by device, becoming a very expensive process in terms of money and time.
From a testing point of view, the dependency of a concrete firmware for each operator makes impossible to benchmark different EPC and IMS vendors in the early stages of a VoLTE deployment. There is no way to use an independent device for benchmarking the performance of two different vendors or network configurations. The implementation of this new feature in commercial devices always requires the support of smartphone and OEM/chipset vendors, this collaboration is only available for few companies.
But not only in the early stages of VoLTE deployment, the industry is running a continuous improvement process that requires measurement tools capable to test services that have not been configured or implemented in commercial devices. There is no parameter that can be used for forcing the device to use a specific feature, it has not been designed for this kind of purposes.
Roaming is another example of a non-viable use case for smartphone-based test solutions, the need for a custom VoLTE client per operator makes impossible to use the same test equipment for testing different networks.
Designed and Built for Being Ecosystem's Representative
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