Q Factor: The Wrong Answer for Service Providers andNEMs Whi

Current market conditions – throughout the economy in general and within the
telecommunications industry in particular – are forcing network operators and network equipment
manufacturers (NEMs) to look for every possible way to both trim costs and boost operating
efficiencies. One obvious strategy for achieving both goals is to install and roll out new services
quicker than before. By shortening installation times and turning up end-user services faster,
network operators and their network equipment vendors hope to earn revenues more quickly.
However, this strategy presents them with another time-related challenge. The service level
agreements (SLAs) and quality-of-service (QoS) agreements that apply to most installation tests
and equipment handovers are partly based on bit-error-ratio (BER) measurements. Given the
industry-wide requirement for very low error ratios, e.g., from 10-12
to 10-15
, conducting BER tests
can slow down the effort to deploy new services more quickly. Even at line rates of 2.5 Gbps and
10 Gbps, a BER test takes a considerable amount of time to achieve statistically valid results for
error ratios of 10 -12
as specified by the ITU-T and for Gigabit Ethernet or even 10 -15
for financial
transactions and banking. These measurements are typically made over 24 hours or 72 hours,
depending on the line rate and individual company procedure.