Costs to verify Broadband Loop Emulation Services (BLES) and V5.x voice gateways greatly reduced.

Adax the industry leader in high performance communications and signaling infrastructure, has been chosen by the European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC) to provide the foundation for its Voice over Broadband (VoB) emulator. The emulator from EANTC, a leading European provider of test and certification services, allows vendors and users of voice gateways to verify standards compliance and performance of access devices without incurring the cost of a large test bed. In addition, further savings are made because the emulated Integrated Access Devices (IADs) are managed by one common user interface, greatly reducing testing time.

Adax's ACT4-PCI communications card provides the network interface and V5.x link layer software for the VoB emulator. With this solid foundation, the emulator is able to monitor a high signaling load and simulate both IADs and Local Exchanges (LEs) in a fully integrated, highly intuitive test environment. Adax's ACT4-PCI card provided EANTC with an easy to implement and cost-effective solution.

The VoB emulator verifies Voice over DSL networks and gateways. Features include the test of signaling protocol behaviour and speech quality, as well as bulk call generation to verify robustness. The unique full emulation of hundreds of IADs and the LE enables customers to test scenarios that would otherwise be impossible or extremely expensive to implement. This powerful and flexible test tool is aimed at manufacturers of network components and network operators.

"Voice over DSL network emulation for IADs and LEs is important for both vendors and users of voice gateways," said Carsten Rossenhoevel, Managing Director Research and Manufacturer Testing, EANTC. "Adax's cost-effective, high performance ACT board was crucial in enabling us to bring the VoB emulator to market rapidly providing us, and our customers, with a commercial advantage. The high port density enables our customers to test full 16-link V5.2 interfaces.

"EANTC's design team integrated our ACT board into the VoB emulator quickly and easily" commented Robin Kent, Director of European Operations, Adax. "This powerful tool is going to really help people with testing Voice over DSL Networks and Gateways, and we look forward to enhancing it further with EANTC".

The ACT4-PCI is a four port fully channelised HDLC board, with high-impedance ports for non-intrusive passive network monitoring and one of the highest port densities in the industry. The ACT card can handle multiple protocols including X.25, Frame Relay, LAPB, LAPD, HDLC, LAPV5, providing up to 1024 DSOs and increasing cell capacity in a single system. This powerful functionality makes the ACT card especially well suited to the emulator in terms of performance and features but it is also a cost-effective solution, a factor that was very important to EANTC.