Making 5G Rollouts Faster and Replicable
XGP engaged with a multinational mobile network provider in Europe to make their 5G service rollout faster and more robust. This MNO was supposed to provide 5G services to the automotive industry for a series of major vehicle brands in Europe for their in-vehicle internet experience and telemetry (IoV). In this case, providing a 5G service with great coverage and seamless roaming handovers across multiple countries and maintaining a high SLA were part of the obligations to be fulfilled.
In order to prepare for such a service engagement, the first step was to set up a test lab in Germany and replicate the target 5G NSA service in a test environment. Usually this involves hundreds of test scenarios and attempting this with a manual test strategy is a highly time-consuming activity. XGP involved with this MNO to provide a unified end-to-end solution for testing this 5G rollout with a series of advantages.
First the testing team used low level diagnostics callabilities of XGP to perform low level tests for proper connectivity and signaling. Each Automotive customer is given unique SIM profiles and testing capabilities of those profiles has to be done as seperate scenarios. Then, a vast number of high-level test cases on the network has to be validated. The scripting capability of XGP came handy in defining these cases in a much faster turnaround time and using them repeatedly in execution. Some examples of high-level test cases are maintaining a data session and initiate a voice call without interrupting the data session, Inter RAT and Intra RAT handovers while a vehicle is moving etc. This particular 5G rollout was as complex as 300+ test scenarios.
Once the lab testing is over, the network service was deployed across many countries. By that time XGP was already equipped with a rich test suite for testing field deployments, making the validations automated and much faster.
How did XGP make a difference in this case? While the test lab was located in Germany, the test team was contributing remotely from many parts of the world including Portugal, India and Israel depending on their expertise. XGP provides low level and high-level cellular test capabilities in one unified framework; reducing the number of tools and complexity involved. Also troubleshooting certain issues were much easier as it provides UE logs that can be compared against network logs. By using XGP in this case, the MNO was able to reduce testing effort and expense significantly.
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