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Aricent recently concluded a series of webinars on “Cloud-based Telecom Testing: Why and How”. The webinars focused on the advantages and strategies for cloud-based testing and highlighted our powerful Software Tool for Automated Testing Environment (STATE) which has been ported to the cloud to enable LTE testing. Even though the Q&A sessions were quite lengthy, we had more questions left to be answered. Here are the answers to all the questions that we couldn't get to during the webinars.

Also, the webinar recording is available for the next 18 months and can be viewed online.

I’m an OEM vendor and have the entire infrastructure already maintained. How can cloud based-testing help me?

In case, the lab environment is already created with the entire infrastructure, then you have to carefully evaluate whether to move to the cloud. There are certain aspects which you can consider during evaluation like OpEx, technical staff for support, anytime anywhere accessibility, scope of enhancing the hardware/software, and scalability/effort consumption. Apart from the expenditure, you need to analyze the benefits that cloud based testing offers over the traditional lab test setup.

I’m looking for testing the SUT using Test Setup-I that was discussed. What details should be shared by me to enable testing?

Aricent recently hosted a webinar titled Leveraging LTE to address opportunities in the area of Public Safety, Rural Networks and other specific industry segments. Thewebinar provided exhaustive insights into the market dynamics of niche markets such as public safety, rural and enterprises along with detailed description of the functionalities and features needed in a LTE core solution to cater to these markets. Given the huge number of questions asked we were not able to answer every one of them live, so we've addressed others that we didn't get to below.

You can also view the archived version of the webinar >

You mentioned about prioritization in in-campus networks. What do you mean by priority in these networks and how do you achieve that?

It’s a well known bromide of user research: customers don’t always know what they want - even when they think they do. Just because they can articulate it explicitly and provide detailed use cases, is no guarantee that once they get the thing they’ve asked for and desired, that they will in fact want it.

This is especially problematic for products that rely on ongoing usage and revenue (e.g. through recurring fees or advertising), and sell the up-front product for little or no cost as a loss-leading carrot. Inability to sustain interest after the initial value has been sated is the nightmare scenario for products like this - which include virtually all mobile apps that want to be actual money makers.

Bryce Roberts offers a cautionary tale of his own making:

For years I told anyone that would listen how much I wanted an app that let me snap a picture of my meal and would tell me how many calories were on the plate….

So when Meal Snap was announced last year, I was thrilled.

I quickly paid my $2.99 and downloaded the app before heading out to breakfast with the kids. I decided to take it for a spin and snapped this picture to test it out. The app worked as advertised and within a few minutes of uploading the image, I got the results back….

And I never opened the app again. 

Unfolding the need for Unified Communications Federation

UC Federation is becoming the communication solution of choice not just for high-flying enterprises with shrinking travel budgets, but for Small Medium Businesses as well. Adoption of unified communications federation in enterprises is accelerating. More and more enterprises are embracing the need for software-powered communications beyond their network boundaries, to facilitate communication and collaboration anytime, anywhere among colleagues, vendors and customers around the globe.

As enterprises deploy unified communications applications for services such as voice, video, presence, instant messaging, conferencing, calendaring, directory, identity, and address book, the enablement of real-time collaboration across enterprises and domains demands solutions that are high-performance, interoperable, policy-regulated, and secure.

Insights into UC Federation

Federation is about establishing Interoperability and establishing trust across two or more UC platforms. This allows end-users from different enterprises to work together as if they were served by the same UC platform, using shared presence information, instant messaging and other features, such as multi-part chat and web-based conferencing.  .

Inter-domain Federation is secure, policy-regulated collaboration between multiple enterprises or public domains that enables the exchange of messaging and presence information between users. Federation is achieved by mediating between services or across a large number of proprietary or standards-based protocols. These domains may be in separate enterprises or represent sub-domains within the same enterprise.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Economist Innovation Conference, held at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. It was a fast-paced (almost too fast), jam-packed event, with lots of good speakers and a heady flow of ideas. The downside to the 1-day format was that there was little time for networking, however they did make sure to get Q&A from the audience in almost every session, which was good.

Here are some of the ideas that came up during the presentations and discussions (assume that these are paraphrasings, not exact quotes):

Daniel Franklin (Economist Executive Editor) had some thoughts on what the world could look like in 2050, including some somewhat jokey company names:

• ExxonHydro (oil and water both will be the valuable resources)
• TataSoft (Indian IT company becomes a full software powerhouse)
• Google Goldman Sachs (since financial knowledge makes sense to become rolled up into Google's storehouse)
• Shanghai Automotive (Chinese car manufacturers have taken the world stage)
• GSKPfizerNovartisAstraZenica (the logical endgame of the pharma business)
• Oxbridge Harvard (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard combine forces)
• BollyDis - Bollywood meets Disney

Laura Tyson (Haas, UC Berkeley): On appropriate role of government in fueling innovation: Don't forget that it was a government grant (National Science Foundation) that funded Larry and Sergey while they were at Stanford, leading to Google.