Racal Instruments has now delivered 145 test cases to a major mobile manufacturer and now has 98% of the entire EGPRS 3GPP test case list delivered, debugged and verified against the most advanced EGPRS mobile phones in development.

There have been some concerns of late within the industry regarding the quality of early validation processes of new wireless features such as EGPRS and 3G. Some suppliers of test equipment, in a bid to have the most test cases validated by the GCF and PTCRB, have supplied test cases which over time have not been up to standard and have had to be withdrawn, culminating in loss of confidence by users.

In order to keep test case withdrawal to a minimum Racal Instruments has debugged and verified its deliverables using industry leading mobile terminals and has applied a more conservative rate of validation submissions to GCF/PTCRB of EGPRS test cases than some of its competitors ensuring that the compliance level is as high as possible.

Racal's EDGE development is now more than three years old and is based on test systems delivered to all major infrastructure manufacturers to assist them in their development of EDGE. The resulting technology formed the basis of Racal's 2.5G mobile tester and became available in 2001. The level of proven reliability of the platform has put Racal in a position where almost every EGPRS test case delivered by setcom is working on the 6103 AIME/CT system.

Dan Quant, product manager, is keen to encourage manufacturers to look at other performance indicators in addition to the volume of GCF/PTCRB validated test cases. He believes that in some cases manufacturers are effectively being used to carry out R&D on behalf of the test equipment supplier detracting the manufacturer from his core activity of product development. Quant explained, "When a manufacturer hits a problem with a test case he submits paperwork requesting that the test case is de- listed. The test case supplier then has 90 days to re-establish that the test case works before the test case has to go through formal re- validation by the certification body (either GCF or PTCRB). In either case the manufacturer is inconvenienced and confidence in the validation process of test cases is diminished. Racal Instruments has made a conscious decision not to go down this route and would suggest that in looking for a supplier of test equipment that a further question to ask after 'How many test cases have been certified by the GCF and PTCRB?' is 'How many have been de-listed?'