Long-Term Evolution (LTE): Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

Those aren’t my pearls of wisdom but the words of Leonardo da Vinci, who knew in the 15th century that removing complexity unveils the greatest opportunities. Our 10th record quarter of growth just ended, a testament to the powers of simplifying what was once an overly complex, brittle, and difficult-to-maintain process.

Now we’re turning our sights toward simplifying the migration to Long-Term Evolution or LTE, the next-generation network for mobile telephony. Backed by heavyweights Verizon and AT&T (and others), LTE has the lofty goal of replacing current 3G capabilities and providing us all with an even higher-performing mobile network. LTE networks will see a crush of application usage and attacks like never before, so stressing these infrastructures is crucial to avoiding performance and security issues. LTE providers are currently building out their networks in order to construct the most optimized and secure infrastructure, and they need to assess performance and security along the way.

Unfortunately, they ran headlong into the same roadblock that has stifled network equipment innovators for decades—conventional testing tools that add layers of cost and complexity and cannot perform at the speeds necessary for modern networks, much less LTE. That is when our phone started ringing. Could BreakingPoint extend its product to integrate the same testing capabilities for LTE networks? And, how quickly can you do it?

BreakingPoint LTE Diaries: Bringing Simplicity, Performance and Ease-of-Use to the LTE Testing Market

The answer was a resounding “yes”. BreakingPoint engineers have started to work on adding LTE support for our product. Turns out, it’s not as complex as some other LTE testing providers have made it out to be. Our product architecture is helping to speed the process because we only need to develop a few changes at the network processor layer. Once those developments are introduced, our growing application and attack libraries will be LTE compatible. All of these capabilities will be fully operational on the BreakingPoint Storm CTM™ chassis.

The real trick will be achieving the massive performance requirements of LTE networks. But that’s something our network processor engineers know a little something about. As you’ll see in upcoming blog posts, we are going to bring you along for this very fast development ride. Publishing our “LTE diaries” here on the blog will bring a new level of transparency to the development process and allow us to garner feedback from you along the way.

Once again, our goal will be to simplify the complexity of validating LTE by delivering a comprehensive solution that delivers real-world network conditions at unprecedented performance levels. At least as fast as our 30 million concurrent TCP sessions—but probably a whole lot faster. This is the only way to be certain that LTE delivers on its performance promise in a secure and stable way.

We will cover the key components of this equation via our blog over the next few weeks. But more important, everything we discuss will be a part of our all-in-one solution. Everything we have always talked about will still ring true for LTE—one product for:

• Real-world LTE application simulation (130+)
• Real-time security attacks (4,500+)
• Realistic mobile network user simulation (millions and millions)
• A single, easy-to-use user interface
• Fully integrated reporting

Too many moving parts introduce needless complexity. Buyers shouldn’t have to cobble together capabilities, UIs and reports to get a picture of performance, security and stability. Add onto that the nickel-and-diming pricing schemes made famous by legacy testing tools vendors, and you can see why LTE providers are asking BreakingPoint if there is a better way.

BreakingPoint’s goal for all LTE providers is to help you establish a highly optimized and hardened LTE network. We will provide full LTE support within our already easy-to-use product. We will allow you to simulate actual LTE mobile traffic, at load. We will continue to provide all updates to the product automatically, including new features, applications and attacks. We will remove the complexity that was in LTE testing and replace it with the simplicity, power and precision of cyber tomography.

Stay tuned and keep it simple.