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Azimuth Systems Adds Breakthrough Functionality to Industry-Leading Wi-Fi(R) Testing Product Portfolio

Posted on: Monday, 12 September 2005, 09:00 CDT

W-Series Product Family adds Targeted Design Engineering Solution, Wi-Fi Certification Scripts, and Voice over Wi-Fi and Emulation Enhancements

Azimuth Systems, Inc., the leading provider of Wi-Fi engineering test equipment, today announced significant enhancements to its popular W-Series product line, the industry's first standardized 802.11 test solution. The company introduced a new platform designed specifically for Wi-Fi design engineers, Voice over Wi-Fi (VoWi-Fi) performance and device emulation capabilities, and significant Wi-Fi industry standard certification capabilities. All products are available immediately.

"Azimuth is focused on tools that enable customers to deliver state-of-the-art wireless products to market quickly with optimal performance and quality, while decreasing development costs," said Ray Cronin, CEO of Azimuth Systems. "Our new products enable customers to deploy equipment more broadly in their organizations and to continue to add functionality to their Azimuth solutions. As we continue to add value to the platform, a growing number of vendors are purchasing our standard equipment to replace the resource and time intensive in-house test set-ups they have previously deployed."

New W-Series Desktop Platform

The new Azimuth(R) W-Series 301W chassis provides Wi-Fi design engineers with a compact testing platform to meet their specific needs. For semiconductor and equipment manufacturers, the desktop platform facilitates departmental testing autonomy with a lower cost design tool that helps design and debug in a controlled radio frequency (RF) environment.

The new W-Series desktop platform is a 3-slot chassis/2 module system, with a purpose built STM-501 module that allows designer engineers to test station roaming, performance, functionality and range on a single system. The STM-501 is the first testing module of its type to provide the multi-purpose testing functions needed on a bench-top solution. The desktop W-Series platform provides the greatest value in the industry at half the cost of the fully populated W-Series system.

"The W-Series is the industry's most flexible testing platform and the only solution that can test device mobility. The broad range of tests that the W-Series supports has resulted in sales to research, design, QA and marketing engineering departments that can all leverage the platform's functionality," said Jeff Abramowitz, Azimuth's vice president of marketing. "The desktop solution enables the tests most often needed by design engineers, and provides a value priced, purpose built tool that they can use to develop, optimize and validate their solutions."

New Performance and Functionality Software Enhancements

Azimuth has enhanced its already rich software environment to include enhancements to VoWi-Fi support. These functional enhancements provide sophisticated voice quality measurements to ensure clear and repeatable voice transmissions, and allow Azimuth's customers a full software test suite for comprehensive Wi-Fi phone analysis. With its new VoWi-Fi tests, Azimuth is the only company to offer fully automated capabilities to test the roaming parameters of Wi-Fi phones.

In addition, Azimuth has added programmable extensions for packet-by-packet generation and analysis to its testMAC(TM) to allow vendors to "stress test" their client-to-access point communication. In the past, faults in the system could disable an access point and compromise the entire wireless network. With this powerful addition, Azimuth's testMAC can isolate problems, analyze their origins and allow software engineers to correct any anomalies, making this the ideal tool for design and validation of complex Wi-Fi functionality and compliance.

New Wi-Fi Certification Testing

The Wi-Fi Alliance (www.wi-fi.org) is a global, non-profit industry association whose testing and certification programs ensure the interoperability of WLAN products based on the IEEE 802.11 specification. Azimuth now offers its customers a full suite of scripts that implement the Wi-Fi Alliance's interoperability tests for certification. This complete battery of automated tests helps vendors pre-test their products.

While Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA(TM)) is already available for baseline secure wireless communications testing, Azimuth has now added support for WPA2(TM) tests, an enhanced section of the new 802.11i Wi-Fi security standard for protected Wi-Fi communications. These testing procedures are critical for vendors selling products to security-sensitive end-users to ensure that product interoperability and performance criteria are maintained.

Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM(TM)) is the Wi-Fi Alliance designed Quality of Service (QoS) testing program for 802.11e, and is increasingly important as triple play over Wi-Fi products are introduced for the home and office. Azimuth's suite of performance tests includes WMM capabilities that offer the ability for vendors to qualify the QoS performance necessary to meet their application's needs. Additionally, for emerging video and VoIP over Wi-Fi products, the new WMM certification scripts in Azimuth's certification suite ensure that current and future voice/video products have the QoS interoperability required to meet Wi-Fi Alliance standards.

With these new capabilities, vendors can now complete Wi-Fi pre-certification testing within hours, compared to the days - or even weeks - it would take with in-house testing procedures.

About The Azimuth W-Series

The Azimuth W-Series is the only industry standard test platform for controlled, repeatable, mobile and automated system level testing of 802.11 wireless access points, clients and other devices. Designed from the ground up as an off-the-shelf, wireless LAN test platform, W-Series systems provide the ability to configure an entire WLAN network in a bench top chassis designed for complete Radio Frequency (RF) isolation and control. The flexibility and programmability of the W-Series allows for the thorough evaluation of wireless LAN equipment under varying conditions and traffic patterns, as well as precise analysis of the results. The patented system offers an ideal environment to perform software design validation and to test advanced wireless functionality including the latest IEEE standards.

About Azimuth

Azimuth is the industry's leading provider of Wi-Fi communications test solutions. Azimuth's products are used by the world's leading Wi-Fi semiconductor and system vendors to test the performance, conformance and certification of wireless devices and networks supporting data, voice and video applications. Azimuth's W-Series, the industry's first standardized 802.11 test solution, leverages a patented architecture to provide a flexible platform that addresses research, development, QA and marketing engineering requirements. The company is based in Acton, Massachusetts and is backed by major venture capital companies. Azimuth may be contacted at (978) 263-6610 or at www.azimuthsystems.com.

"Wi-Fi(R), Wi-Fi Alliance(R), the Wi-Fi logo, and the Wi-Fi ZONE logo are registered trademarks of the Wi-Fi Alliance; and Wi-Fi CERTIFIED(TM), WMM(TM), WPA(TM), WPA2(TM), Wi-Fi ZONE(TM), the Wi-Fi CERTIFIED logo, and the Wi-Fi Alliance logo are trademarks of the Wi-Fi Alliance."

Source: Business Wire

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