Growing corporate use of public wireless Internet access in Greater China may prove a boon for the struggling test and measurement business of Agilent Technologies.
Agilent officials said the company's latest product, the Network Troubleshooting Center (NTC), addresses the need of service providers and enterprise network operators to test all major applications - voice, mobile and data - for all critical wide area and local area network (LAN) technologies.
In Asia, the NTC device is expected to be used to test Wi-Fi (short for wireless fidelity) 'hot spots' based on the 802.11b high-frequency, wireless LAN standard.
These hot spots operate in the 2.4 gigahertz range and offer data connection speeds of up to 11 megabits per second. Hot spots can include airports, large shopping malls, convention centres and chains of coffee houses in Hong Kong, the mainland and Taiwan. Other big deployments of Wi-Fi networks in Asia are in Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Australia.
Van Negley, manager at Agilent's network systems test division, said: 'The NTC dramatically improves fault isolation and resolution, and cuts the time required to deploy new services by providing network engineers troubleshooting access from one centralised site - a set-up that increases network availability and reduces operating costs.'
First released in the United States in February at a starting price of US$12,500, the NTC is being tested by operators in Japan. Outside of the US, the main reference customer for the NTC is Germany's Deutsche Telekom.