AUGUST 28, 2009 -- Tollgrade Communications Inc. has launched a new service assurance platform called Stratum. Stratum is designed to help telecom providers integrate new IP-based network testing initiatives with existing platforms, thus providing integrated test analysis across a variety of access technologies.
The Stratum service assurance platform has been designed to support end-to-end diagnostics for triple-play services with the goal of providing telecom operators with a higher degree of reliable service delivery.
Tollgrade says Stratum will support multiple data inputs from a customer's network and test resources -- including Tollgrade's existing 4TEL, Celerity, and LoopCare software platforms and test probes -- and perform combinational expert system analysis of faults in the access network to enable more effective dispatching of field resources.
Stratum is currently being deployed in trials with customers in the United States and South America. It is expected to be generally available to the market by the end of this year.
"This will be the first release of Tollgrade's software platform strategy to support testing of next-generation architectures and services. Stratum is one part of our strategy to support the transformation of Tollgrade's telecom business," said Joseph Ferrara, Tollgrade's chairman, president, and CEO.
Commenting on Stratum, Patrick Kelly, research director and industry analyst at Analysys Mason, said, "Tollgrade has developed this platform with the needs of the customer service organization in mind, ensuring those teams have the information to know the root cause of a trouble report, and how to quickly and effectively respond to it. This customer service response is especially important for supporting complex triple-play services such as IP video where fast fault isolation is necessary to get customers' service restored as quickly as possible."
Added Chris Barton, Tollgrade's executive director of technical marketing, "Based on a representative model, the Stratum platform can achieve operational payback in 12 to 18 months. In addition, we anticipate ongoing development of this product line through various partnerships in an effort to widely deploy this software system test solution."