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Craig Mathias

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Rethinking Convergence: Ixia’s New Look at Carrier Wi-Fi

Service providers are quickly realizing the value of Wi-Fi. Ixia’s new Best Practices Guide will help them make the most of it.

By Craig Mathias on Tue, 10/18/11 - 1:02pm.

. What's this?

Network-performance-testing leader Ixia today announced what the company is describing as a testing methodology for cellular offload - moving some cellular traffic onto Wi-Fi. Normally I wouldn't get too excited about a methodology, but what's of great interest here is the availability of the firm's Site Deployment Best Practices Guide - a very interesting read indeed. Ixia, of course, is very well-known for their routing and switching test products, and, with the recent acquisition of VeriWave, a very comprehensive Wi-Fi test capability as well. But many are unaware that the company also offers test solutions for a wide variety of wide-area wireless technologies, including LTE, femotcell, 3G, IMS, mobile backhaul, and more. And Ixia's announcement today is further evidence that the marriage of cellular and Wi-Fi has the potential to form a very strong bond indeed.

Look, without Wi-Fi, cellular is never going to be able to deliver all the cool services the carriers are touting, most notably streaming video and video conferencing, but really including all data - and, ultimately, voice - services. While cellular technologies, like HSPA+ and LTE, continue to improve in efficiency and capacity, the carriers themselves simply don't have the spectrum to address the expectations they've set. It's thus Wi-Fi or bust.

The Best Practices Guide is a hefty read - 27 pages of content, and a lot to consider. But there's a lot of good advice here, and, sure, while the examples make use of their own gear, the content focuses on the practical and the objective. There's much value in these pages even if you're not an Ixia customer at present - and, in fact, even if you're not a carrier.

It's my hope that cellular carriers will proceed with productive Wi-Fi deployments with all due speed. I'm sure I'm not unique in noticing that cellular data performance remains highly variable. I'd hate to be one who has to point out that such is in fact indicative of a trend that's heading the wrong direction.