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TraceSpan’s TestHead Solution for ADSL
TraceSpan’s TestHead Solution for ADSL

The ADSL service life cycle begins with the assigning of a copper line between the Central Office and the Customer Premise, continues through the installation phase, and concludes with the ongoing operation of the ADSL equipment. Each phase in this cycle conceals potential problems and delays.

Commercially available test equipment offers solutions to some of these problems. Time Domain Reflectometer (TDR) can locate short circuits and open circuits. Some ADSL DSLAM vendors provide Performance Monitoring (PM) statistics reports extracted by their equipment. Other test equipment has an internal ADSL modem emulator, but it does not have the ability to indicate what is wrong once the modems fail to connect.

There is no single test equipment solution at the Central Office that can efficiently produce a comprehensive view of the ADSL lines and equipment status.

TraceSpan’s TestHead Solution
TraceSpan's TestHead solution is multi-tier equipment designed for use by all the technical levels at the service provider. The TestHead can produce reports that range from a simple pass/fail for the field technician to a detailed signal level report of an initialization sequence that may be useful to the equipment vendor engineer. The reports and data may be exported for further analysis using the DSL Xpert™ system by an expert engineer at the service provider or R&D engineer at the equipment vendor.

Telco's Technicians and Field Application Engineers
Loop qualification processes and simple errors are detected and handled by technicians and field application engineers. Examples of such events are line shorts or opens, modems that do not initiate because of protocol mismatches, etc.

Communication Network Engineers
The TraceSpan TestHead provides detailed reports to the communication engineer who is more familiar with ADSL technology. Very frequent Bit-swaps, for example, can indicate noisy lines. A burst of CRC errors may indicate abrupt changes in the noise level. Reports of illegal ADSL messages during Showtime may be collected during the real time analysis mode and transferred to the ADSL vendor for further investigation.

Telco's Experts and Vendors
Some errors may require the expertise of the service provider’s ADSL communication experts or the ADSL equipment engineer. Usually these issues appear due to interoperability problems between the ADSL equipment or incompatibility with the ADSL Standard. Consequently, this may cause frequent failures of the ADSL connections in unpredictable times, sometimes hours or days after the ADSL session started. In order to resolve these errors, the expert may use his DSL Xpert™ system to analyze records that were collected by the communication engineer. The service provider engineer will then use the DSL Xpert™ analysis results to isolate the problem that was identified during either the short measurement or the real time analysis mode. The service provider’s expert will have the ability to pin-point the problem and discuss it with the ADSL vendor, as well as to export the recorded data to the vendor for further analysis.

For additional information please contact us at info@tracespan.com