Wi-Fi service providers seem to be forever in competition with one another, but they tend to be on the same team when it comes to identifying a common pain point: customer care calls and technician dispatches, also known as truck rolls. The latter are particularly expensive, involving a variety of hidden costs: unbillable travel time, vehicle depreciation, and the opportunity costs associated with times when technicians are spread too thin to be available. There are, of course, a variety of more obvious costs as well: technician wages, vehicle fuel and maintenance, and so on.
What might be less apparent to the accountant hunched over a spreadsheet trying to keep their business in the black is that many of these costs can be altogether avoided — and without impacting one’s reputation for providing stellar customer service. The key: testing to gauge the performance of Wi-Fi routers before they are made available to customers.
This is where a company like octoScope, a maker of isolated, repeatable and automated wireless personal testbeds, comes in. Such testbeds are designed to evaluate the behavior and performance of wireless devices and systems, with scalability to support a single device under test (DUT) or multi-node mesh systems under test. The company recently announced its incorporation of the latest updates from the Broadband Forum, a nonprofit industry consortium dedicated to developing network specifications.
The Broadband Forum maintains a standard for in-home Wi-Fi router performance known as TR-398. It is unique in the industry as a systematic and quantitative evaluation tool for home Wi-Fi router performance, which it gauges across seven dimensions: receiver sensitivity, throughput, coverage, multiuser support, anti-interference, stability and mesh networks. Currently, there are 17 test cases required by the latest TR-398 standard; recent updates involve performance test cases for Wi-Fi 6 and mesh networks, including roaming outage and throughput via mesh repeaters.
All 17 of these test cases can now be run on the octoScope’s most comprehensive testbed, the STACK-MAX. Its subsets STACK-MIN and STACK-MESH can each run selected portions of the test cases, as well. Implementation features a web user interface (UI) that enables TR-398 test cases to be run individually, in groups or all at once. A printable HTML report is generated at the end of test case execution.
“This test solution will be of great benefit to telecom operators and end users when selecting optimal Wi-Fi solutions,” said Fanny Mlinarsky, founder of octoScope.
