SAN JOSE--Spirent Communications launched an IP Telephony rollout platform this week at VON that assesses and validates signaling performance and call quality in pre-production VoIP networks. In the process, Spirent also rolled out new customers: Sylantro Systems and Carrius Technologies.

The Distributed Abacus IP Telephony Rollout Platform can help carriers introduce large-scale VoIP services by emulating real-world traffic from multiple points on the network before rolling the service out to customers. Abacus takes IP telephony testing beyond the lab and into the network.

"This takes hundreds of man years of experience in lab testing to a new phase," said Bahaa Moukadam, vice president of IP Telephony performance analysis at Spirent.

The distributed platform treats multiple Abacus IP Telephony test systems as a single, virtual platform for testing IP and hybrid IP/TDM networks. It provides network statistics such as: jitter, delay and packet loss; call measurements statistics such as call setup time, percent of call completions; and voice quality metrics such as MOS, PESQ and R value. The distributed platform is a part of Spirent's overall Abacus 5000 platform.

To compliment the rollout platform, Spirent will offer an IP Telephony Network Assessment Service that incorporates on-site Spirent Global Services experts, an initial assessment of the customer's requirements, customized network analysis, corrective recommendations and, if necessary, a follow-on service with in-depth testing of specific problems.

Spirent announced at the conference that Sylantro has selected its Abacus 5000 IP Telephony Migration Test System to validate the performance, scalability and reliability of its telecom-grade application server platform. The system incorporates triple play, conformance and security/robustness test methodologies. Triple-play testing provides validation of voice services in the presence of data and video services across IP and PSTN infrastructures. The conformance testing ensures that products adhere to specified standards while the robustness testing focuses on reliability and dependability.

Spirent's other new customer, Carrius, has selected the Abacus 5000 for engineering and production testing of its Compleat-200 intelligent IP gateway. Carrius uses the Abacus 500 in conjunction with its own Web-enabled test automation software, which runs more than 2000 automated testing scripts, to perform around-the-clock automated regression testing for thousands of simultaneous tests.

Spirent also announced the availability of the H.235 VoIP gateway message encryption test capability on its Abacus 5000 IP Telephony Migration Test System. The H.235 capability, the first in a series of planned security implementations, enables network operators and equipment manufacturers to validate the effectiveness of signaling encryption for VoIP gateways and gatekeepers within a multi-zoned H.323 environment.

"When the industry itself starts thinking about security, we have reached a new level of maturity," said Andy Huckridge, product marketing manager of IP telephony, performance analysis.