By Kelly Hill
Netscout said this week that it will be handling end-to-end service assurance visibility for Southern Linc, the wireless service unit of Southern Company that provides private, mission-critical LTE for enterprise customers — in particular, its fellow Southern Company subsidiaries Alabama Power, Georgia Power and Mississippi Power.
Netscout said that its nGeniusONE, nGenius session analyzer, packet flow switches, and high-capacity InfiniSteamNG probes have been installed in two Southern Linc data centers, and will “help accelerate root cause identification and streamline workflows” for network operations.
“Our customers depend on Southern Linc to provide a highly reliable mission-critical LTE network for their critical data and voice communications,” said president and CEO of Southern Linc, Tami Barron. “Netscout was able to support these needs by deploying their solutions in our data centers. As a result, they’re helping us provide a more resilient and secure wireless communications network with the quality our customers demand.”
Netscout noted in a release that Southern Linc’s private 4G LTE network gives its power utility customers access to their Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) IoT devices in the field to provide information on grid performance and can be used to avoid or quickly resolve power outages. COO of Netscout, Michael Szabados said that Southern Linc “can now easily identify which IoT sessions failed, including timing and cause, to resolve issues quickly. In addition, as the company continues to expand, our solution can support incremental, cost-efficient growth.”
In other test news:
–CTIA has launched a new security testing and validation initiative for commercial 5G networks. The 5G Security Test Bed (STB) was born out of CTIA’s Cybersecurity Working Group “to test 5G security recommendations across real-world conditions using commercial-grade equipment and facilities,” CTIA said in a release.
Its founding members are AT&T, Ericsson, T-Mobile US, US Cellular, Mitre, and the University of Maryland. The testbed uses Ericsson equipment and is initially set up with a 5G Non-Standalone configuration; it is physically located at a secure lab facility at the University of Maryland, with the core hosted in northern Virginia by Mitre, which is a not-for-profit research and development company. Read the full story here.
–Keysight Technologies is laying claim to being the first to submit 5G New Radio protocol test cases to 3GPP related to enhanced network slicing and power-saving features in Release 16.
“Access to verified test cases that support advanced 5G features enable chipset and device makers to capture early market opportunities focused on private 5G, industrial IoT, smart city and transportation applications,” said GM of Keysight’s device validation solutions business, Muthu Kumaran.
In related company news, Keysight said that its 5G test tools have been chosen by test lab Eurofins Electrical & Electronics (E&E) Taiwan to expand its services for testing of 5G device conformance validation and regulatory test requirements.
–Tektronix has launched a new “B version” of its 5 Series mixed signal oscilloscope, which features new tools for offline analysis of data and remote collaboration, including cloud data storage. Tek also touted a new auxiliary trigger input that lets users synchronize the oscilloscope to an external signal without consuming any of the input channels. It also has a brighter display, a faster processor and a “history mode” with extended memory.
“Setting up our 5 Series MSO has been really intuitive,” said associate test engineer in product support development at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Wyatt Callister in a statement on the new oscilloscope. “Digging through the menus on older oscilloscopes can be quite a headache, but the nice, large, informative buttons on this new scope have been really useful. I appreciate Tektronix’s ongoing developments and the improved features they just released.”
