Spirent

How we helped a leading telecommunications testing company deliver its new GNSS Foresight service

Spirent Communications (LSE: SPT) is a global leader with deep expertise and decades of experience in testing, assurance, analytics, and security, serving developers, service providers, and enterprise networks. They help bring clarity to increasingly complex technological and business challenges.

For more information, visit: www.spirent.com

Industry

Telecomunications
Quality assurance

Results

Faster time to market
High data availability
Simplified operations

Background

Jeremy Bennington is the VP of Position, Navigation, and Time (PNT) Assurance at Spirent Communications, a world leader in telecommunications testing. His team is responsible for assuring the quality and integrity of the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) data they deliver to clients in automotive, logistics, telecoms, and other industries.

In January 2022, Jeremy’s team chose Navmatix to provide and maintain the infrastructure for hosting their new GNSS Foresight Service. Utilizing precise orbital modelling and high-definition maps, the service brings situational awareness to unmanned aerial systems that standard line-of-site operations cannot.

The Challenge

To build a specialized, high-performance, high-availability content delivery network capable of distributing real-time gnss data at scale.

GNSS technology is evolving rapidly, but most of today’s systems still lack the integrity and to-the-meter accuracy needed to support autonomous operations like those of small UAVs or self-driving cars. GNSS Foresight addresses these limitations with high-resolution 3D maps of cities and terrain combined with up-to-date heatmaps to give accurate predictions on signal availability in any given area.

Spirent uses the data to perform calculations in a high-performance computing environment, but then it needs a way to send that data to end users in real-time and at scale. For this, they needed a content delivery network (CDN) that would give clients access to real-time GNSS insights. In doing so, it sought to enable reliable autonomous navigation with real-time data for risk analysis, operations planning, and optimization.

Spirent initially looked into several CDN vendors. However, what they really needed was a specialized solution that would offer excellent performance and high reliability for geospatial data.

Spirent considered major vendors like Akamai, Amazon, and Microsoft, but determined they were too generalist to provide the level of functionality they were looking for. They needed a partner to build a customized CDN for Spirent’s data service, so they chose Navmatix.

The Solution

Navmatix helped spirent build, deploy, and manage a bespoke content delivery network designed specifically for handling gnss data.

Spirent worked with Navmatix to build a bespoke CDN that could accommodate their unique data delivery and resilience needs. Navmatix’s unique experience working with GNSS data and use cases made it a dependable partner in building and maintaining the cloud infrastructure required for end users to efficiently query, understand, and interact with the data. Navmatix’s previous experience in the GNSS space, including working on projects involving real-time kinematics (RTK), made them an obvious choice compared to generalist vendors.

“There’s a time to market advantage in customizing a solution for our specific needs, and development was a vital part of that. Navmatix really offered a world-class service by understanding our unique requirements enough to come back with intelligent questions and solutions. The collaboration has been phenomenal.”

Before choosing Navmatix as their data delivery partner, one other possible option was to build a solution in-house from scratch. However, this would be significantly costlier and more time-consuming, especially given that Spirent’s team were architecting an entire cloud solution, integrating the service with customers, and developing the core GNSS Foresight platform. Implementing the CDN was the remaining major part of the puzzle, and Navmatix assisted with both development and ongoing operation of the CDN. They now serve as an extension to Spirent’s team, providing security, reliability, and continuous improvement to their mission-critical systems.

The Result

Equipped with proprietary technology, spirent’s content delivery network spearheaded the launch of their cutting-edge gnss foresight service.

Spirent’s partnership with Navmatix continues to prove mutually beneficial on every level. Jeremy describes the company’s unique ability to understand GNSS content and building a CDN to accommodate their specific use case as a critical enabler in Spirent’s accelerating deployment of their GNSS Foresight service.