British Multinational telecommunications testing company Spirent has partnered with Amazon Web Services to allow service providers working on building 5G networks to leverage automated 5G testing capabilities. These automated 5G testing capabilities will help reduce operational costs and time-to-market, which is the time difference between when a product is conceived and when it is available for sale. With 5G budding at a rapid pace in countries worldwide, such partnerships enabling service providers to test their capabilities would definitely act as a catalyst and speed up work on 5G networks.
The Partnership Will Help Validate Mobile Network Functions
The newly formed partnership between Spirent and AWS would give service providers, or carriers access to Spirent’s vendor-neutral Landslide 5GC Automation Package along with AWS’s Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. This will enable carriers to validate mobile network functions, services for performance, capacity and compliance, and other requirements.
The solution involving elements from both Spirent and AWS can also support parallel testing. Spirent has stated the benefits of this partnership for carriers by saying that manually setting up all these tests could be not only time-consuming but also very complex for some organisations. This would cause a delay in building 5G networks as carriers would be forced into months-long testing and validating programs. Spirent also noted that by using Landslide on AWS, carriers would just need to trigger the tests and complete validation.
Spirent Provides Testing Capabilities Through Various Cloud Providers
Spirent’s Senior Director of Product Management, Anil Kollipara, commented on the partnership by saying that Spirent already provides identical testing capabilities through several other cloud providers, virtual machine and container platforms. He added that any business providing 5G capabilities like VNFs, CNFs, NFVI, and services need to include test automation in their offering. Spirent’s recognises AWS as an avenue where CSPs can consume their test automation software.
The partnership between Spirent and AWS comes days after Telefonica validated AWS as an option for 5G SA core deployment in Brazil. That project also included Spirent as the provider for testing the end-to-end system. AWS has been actively working on 5G networks by collaborating with vendors like Verizon in the past few months.
