The Octobox STA Automation Suite Significantly Accelerates Performance Testing Workflows
Recently, Spirent Communications announced the launch of the Octobox STA Automation Suite. As the industry’s first solution, this suite enables comprehensive performance testing and validation automation for client terminals and devices in Wi-Fi 6/6E and Wi-Fi 7 networks. This new automation suite aims to replace time-consuming, inconsistent, and resource-intensive manual testing with a structured, repeatable, and scalable automated validation workflow, significantly accelerating the testing process for Wi-Fi terminal devices.
Wi-Fi technology is evolving at an unprecedented pace, with the market share of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E expected to exceed 80% by 2025, and the next-generation Wi-Fi 7 technology rapidly gaining traction. The swift rise of this new era of wireless technology presents challenges for manufacturers to ensure the reliable performance of increasingly complex Wi-Fi-connected devices.
James Kimery, Vice President of Wireless Product Management at Spirent, stated:
With advancements in technologies such as 320 MHz channels, 4096 QAM modulation, and multi-link operation, the complexity and time required to test next-generation Wi-Fi devices have increased exponentially. Our new STA automation suite is designed to help quality assurance teams tackle these challenges by providing a comprehensive automated performance testing workflow that can reduce testing time by up to 70% compared to manual methods, and execute dozens of test scenarios in the time it previously took to run just a few.
The Spirent Octobox testing platform is a customizable combination of shielded enclosures and instruments for testing wireless (OTA) Wi-Fi devices and equipment. The new STA automation suite provides a fully automated testing suite that ensures devices can achieve optimal performance in real-world environments. It enables manufacturers to automate the execution of repeatable, round-the-clock, and multi-site parallel testing, thereby eliminating inconsistencies associated with manual testing and allowing for more frequent validation of more devices in a wider range of environments.
The STA automation suite addresses key issues in Wi-Fi device evaluation:
- Performance and Throughput: Achieve up to 50% performance improvement through comprehensive multi-site testing.
- Scalability: Supports large-scale multi-device, multi-environment testing without human intervention.
- Comprehensive Validation: Ensures maximum throughput, rate and distance relationships, fixed modulation and coding scheme (MCS) scanning, multi-user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO), orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), roaming reliability, and backward compatibility.
The STA automation suite is built on the comprehensive Wi-Fi terminal device testing capabilities of Octobox and can be seamlessly integrated into the Octobox testing platform ecosystem, enabling manufacturers to comprehensively validate a variety of Wi-Fi terminal devices, including consumer-grade smartphones, laptops, tablets, medical and educational applications, and networking equipment.The Octobox STA automation suite is also offered as part of Spirent’s Wi-Fi Device Testing as a Service (TaaS), which can shorten the turnaround time for devices submitted to Spirent for performance testing.“Read the original article” to learn more about Spirent’s Wi-Fi software.—
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