Spirent Sharpens Its Focus on 5G and Lifecycle Service Assurance

The test, measurement, and assurance company Spirent unveiled new initiatives to grow its 5G, lifecycle service assurance, and analytics businesses. The U.K.-based company will also explore new use cases such as virtualization and autonomous vehicles. In its second quarter 2018 earnings call yesterday, Spirent said it recently won new customers in 5G development, in 100G and 400G Ethernet performance testing, and in the lifecycle service assurance segment. It boasted of a deal with an unnamed Tier 1 U.S. service provider. Spirent also saw an increase in U.S. government spending in the quarter. The company said that the trade spat between the United States and China is placing pressure on its business, particularly within its high-speed Ethernet and virtualization segment. Spirent noted that even with the supply embargo with ZTE lifted, a risk remains as trade relations between the two countries remain volatile. Spirent has worked with, and continues to work with, a number of Chinese companies, and it remains to be seen if their partnerships will be effected by the trade relations. China Unicom and Huawei have both in the past used Spirent’s technology to test NFV requirements on virtualization middleware. Most recently, China Mobile leveraged Spirent to test eight NFV infrastructure platforms to demonstrate 5G C-RAN capabilities. The company highlighted that within its lifecycle service assurance business it saw an increase in orders from $11.1 million to $41.5 million. It noted that six of its orders were valued at greater than $1 million. Going forward, it will expand its VisionWorks platform — which provides unified service assurance for mobile, fixed, and transport services — to serve 5G and IoT, and to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities into the platform and new applications. In 5G, Spirent has nine products available. It has helped build a service that automates 5G labs for a major equipment vendor. It built a test for a 5G core for a major network operator. And it built a channel emulator for 5G mmWave testing. Going forward, it intends to continue building testing services and products for 5G devices and network equipment.