Mosaik Solutions moves into network-testing market

Mosaik Solutions is expanding into the network-testing market in hopes of providing carriers and M2M-solution providers with a more efficient way to measure how end-user devices are performing on networks.

Click here for a larger version of this image, showing the Mosaik network testing platform.

Mosaik--which has been focused on providing detailed maps of network coverage and cell towers to carriers, ISPs and those who study them--is expanding into the test arena via an exclusive licensing deal with Xencode to use its  XenSurvey cloud-network analytics platform.

The deal could put Mosaik into closer competition with other, more established network testing vendors, including Spirent Communications, Anite and others.

In an interview with FierceWireless at last week's Super Mobility Week conference in Las Vegas, Mosaik CEO Bryan Darr emphasized that the XenSurvey technology is not meant to replace Layer 3 network testing by carriers. Instead, he said, it is designed to make network deployment and testing more efficient and gives network testers carrier-grade analytics tools.

Using up to seven Android smartphones, carriers can conduct drive tests to see how their network compares with the competition and measure signal strength, downlink and uplink speeds, and latency. Users can test the network as often as every two minutes, every 30 minutes or at longer intervals. The data lets network testers get a more complete picture of the network over time, Darr said, adding that users can do drive tests or see how a fixed location in the network with highly concentrated congestion performs over time.

Importantly, once the tests are done users can load them into the cloud almost instantaneously and generate reports to see how different networks stack up to one another. Users can see how long they were connected to LTE networks or HSPA or CDMA networks or had no network coverage at all. Users can also map out their drives and see that information.

The benefit for carriers is that they can see how end-users are experiencing their networks before they engage in more expensive network testing. Additionally, he said, an M2M-technology provider can use the testing to see whether a carrier's claims of network strength and quality match up to what is happening in the real world. For some providers, this especially important, Darr said, noting that a company providing a wirelessly connected security system could decrease its liability if it could demonstrate that the system failed because of poor network performance.

Further, Darr said, tower companies and cell-site providers can load the data into Google Earth and make the case to carriers that they need towers in a particular area because of weak signal strength.

In other Mosaik news, the company has acquired TowerSource, which has a North American asset database. The deal will add tower-site-location information to Mosaik's mapping technology.

Darr said that it will take several months to integrate the TowerSource database into Mosaik's products and that the company is querying TowerSource users about what they would like to see added or changed.

 For more:
- see these two separate Mosaik releases

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