Spirent Communications has collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring automated 5G testing capabilities to communications service providers (CSPs). With Spirent’s market-first Landslide 5GC Automation Package, carriers can rapidly deploy 5G networks on AWS. This aims to significantly reduce operational costs, time, and resources compared to manual testing.
By combining AWS’s Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline with Spirent’s vendor-neutral 5G test capabilities, CSPs will be able to validate mobile network functions and services across a wide range of requirements seamlessly. These include compliance, capacity, and performance dimensions.
“Service providers around the world are facing a number of distinct challenges as they look to deliver on the promise of 5G,” said Doug Roberts, general manager of Spirent’s Lifecycle Service Assurance business. “The race is on to deploy new 5G technology, but because it is highly complex and new, there is a genuine lack of expertise and resources available to establish and deliver the vital 5G core testing and validation necessary to successfully get these complex networks and services to market.”
Operators can easily leverage the fully integrated 5G test automation capabilities to rapidly test and validate their 5G network functions and services. The solution is intended to be highly scalable to support many parallel tests while allowing several types of network tests to be part of the 5G Network application pipeline.
“Manually establishing such complex testing requirements is a very time-consuming process, typically running into many months,” says Roberts. “Thanks to our new collaboration with AWS, service providers can leverage Spirent’s 5G expertise and proven test methodologies to easily incorporate automated 5G testing and validation on AWS, reducing months to minutes. They will be able to test with confidence, dramatically accelerate time-to-market, and analysis shows significant cost savings can be achieved compared to traditional manual testing methods.”
To put it simply, CSPs can simply trigger the tests and complete validation without conducting any manual testing or development of their own testing suites. This can reduce the risk of service failure by testing multi-vendor 5G core elements and accelerate test automation.