Spirent, AWS Partner to Deliver Automated 5G Network Testing

Spirent Communications has announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring automated 5G testing capabilities to communications service providers (CSPs) building 5G networks on AWS.

Spirent’s market-first Landslide 5GC Automation Package is designed to help carriers to rapidly deploy 5G networks on AWS, significantly reducing 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 objectively, rapidly, and continuously validate mobile network functions and services across a wide range of requirements, including compliance, capacity, and performance dimensions. The combined solution is aimed at mobile carriers who want to accelerate delivery of 5G services on AWS.

“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.”

With the introduction of 5G Network Validation on AWS, utilizing Spirent’s Landslide 5GC Automation Package, operators can easily leverage the fully integrated 5G test automation capabilities to rapidly test and validate both deployments and updates of 5G network functions and services. It provides a continuous delivery framework using AWS CodePipeline, together with its security and observability best practices, and is available in all AWS Regions. The solution is fully decoupled and highly scalable, supporting many parallel tests, while allowing several types of network tests which can be automatically triggered as 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.”

CSPs can simply trigger the tests and complete validation with no additional need for manual testing or development of their own testing suites. It can reduce the risk of service failure by testing multi-vendor 5G core elements and accelerate test automation without the need to construct from scratch.