Europe : UbiNetics, the world leader in WCDMA and HSDPA terminal and test and measurement technology, has launched a tool aimed at helping operators to evaluate interactions between 3G phones and networks. As the number of mobile devices increases, the move will help operators to identify and fix problems before they go live on the network.

SystemAT will automate the testing of any commercial mobile or group of mobiles against a test network. This allows operators to explore a mobile phone’s stability and performance under various scenarios, including different radio and network loading conditions, with other mobiles attached to the network and interacting with it. Complex test scenarios can be defined and performed allowing, for example, the automation of final acceptance testing of new phones against a network. SystemAT builds on UbiNetics’s LG200 Load Generator product, already in use with a number of operators.

Channel conditions between each phone and the network can be simulated using programmable RF (radio frequency) attenuators, and to ensure repeatability, each phone is individually screened from extraneous RF signals. The RF control allows the most complex handover scenarios to be generated to really test the full capability of a phone and network.

"As more and more 3G networks go live, the importance of the quality of service delivered to customers is increasing”, said Neil Peniket, Vice President responsible for the SystemAT developments at UbiNetics. “SystemAT provides an automated test environment than can run a wide range of scenarios representative of live network conditions to test both the phone and the network. The comprehensive test coverage this provides is the key to increasing the stability of both the phones and the network to the standard which will be required to satisfy the demands of 3G subscribers.”

SystemAT is designed to be compatible with any mobile phone, and can be used for testing of mobile phones and networks of any technology (GSM, GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA, CDMA2000, TD-SCDMA).