Testing for Optimum Performance

"Our modern communication has become ex-tremely complex. Many smartphone apps have now become standard tools of everyday commu-nication and their absence would be inconceivable in the lives of most smartphone users, for instance in online shopping", says Managing Director Adil Kaya, one of the co-founders of SIGOS. "And with online banking and mobile television, users also expect everything to work perfectly. This is pre-cisely where we step in, with our active testing solutions, ensuring that cell carriers are able to offer mobile communication services of optimum quality."

And they’ve been so successful at this that SIGOS is now working for 440 cell carriers in over 150 countries, including the 100 top cell carriers and over 650 companies around the world. "We start-ed out as a systems integrator for German cell car-riers in 1989", said Head of Sales Joachim Bam-berger. "

In the 1990s, we focused on end-to-end testing of fixed line and cellular networks. Service quality testing for cell carriers was then added to this. By the 2000s, we were already using a system that would now be considered the Cloud. Our system made it possible to perform global roaming quality testing. This has definitely been a major milestone in our development." through their smartphones. "Networked services are being used by more and more people, and it is the responsibility of cell car-riers to provide the requisite quality.

“With our active testing solutions, ensuring that cell carriers are able to offer mobile communication services of optimum quality.”

We switched from our initial, purely service-based proposition to a product-based business, enabling simulations of the use of telecommunications net-works from a user perspective”, said Head of De-velopment Gerald Wittmann.

“We refer to our tools as ‘probes’, which we set up for customers somewhere in Germany – for example Vodafone – making it possible to test whether everything is working.

Put simply, there’s no longer any need for two people to phone each other to test the quality. Instead, the test is done automatically. We ad-dress simple questions such as ‘what does the customer want to do with the cell carrier’s ser-vice?’ ‘Is the quality good or is the cell coverage okay?’ We monitor, we detect problems and we offer active improvement solutions.” Using its testing solutions, SIGOS is able to simulate cus-tomer usage behavior and conduct proactive testing. Roaming scenarios can also be studied. “Let’s say a customer in Japan wants to call home in Germany. Or maybe a German user calls a Japa-nese user in Japan. The roaming has to work properly. Today, quality testing can be done with our own ‘probes’ on an international scale” in just seconds, summarizes Adil Kaya. “These are very real scenarios that we are dealing with here. Eve-ryone is now using smartphones, which are mini-computers. If something doesn’t work, the user calls the cell carrier, which means that smartphones are also tested. Just like the apps on the smartphone. In Germany, there aren’t all that many apps being used yet, whereas in Africa, it’s an entirely different situation. There, apps are used to transfer money. So national testing of apps is extremely important.”

SIGOS also offers solutions to identify network fraud, a field that offers great potential. In the future, topics such as 5G, network quality and network services as well as apps will shape SIGOS’ work. These testing solutions will become increas-ingly essential for more and more industries, in-cluding the automotive, financial and insurance sectors, enabling them to survive on the market.

“These are very real scenarios that we deal with here. Every-one is now using smartphones.”