Posted: 06/2000

Teradyne Opens Cable Farm in Midwest
By Stacy Lane Linkmeyer

From the Midwestern breadbasket of
Deerborn, Ill., a modern farm–of sorts–has appeared on the landscape.

Missing are rows of corn, grain or soybeans. They’ve been replaced by more than 95,000 feet of cable of varying gauges and lengths, cross-connects, pedestals, switches, network equipment and customer premises equipment.

Teradyne Inc. Telecommunications Division
(www.teradyne.com) recently opened its “Cable Farm,”–the fourth live telecommunications test lab in the world.

“We’re the only non-telephone company to have a facility,” says Teradyne’s Frank Bauer, director of engineering for advanced product development. “If you think about telephone companies, they have them for their own purposes. Ours is an industry resource.”

The other testing labs are British Telecom’s
(www.bt.com) lab in Martlesham, United Kingdom; Ameritech’s
(www.ameritech.com) lab, Hoffman Estates, Ill.; and GTE’s
(www.gte.com) in Waltham, Mass., Bauer says.

Seeking cream-of-the-crop Internet testing systems, Teradyne uses its farm to test products that gauge the integrity of world-class telecommunications networks for voice, high-speed data transmission and Internet connectivity. Independent of supplier and provider, it is the largest of the test labs and the only one that provides the most complete and unbiased product verification.

The new lab also allows Teradyne to reduce its product development cycle time by providing an accurate simulation of the world’s copper access networks, creating an environment where new testing technologies can be put through trials rapidly against real-world networks.

Unlike other test labs, the cable farm simulates the access networks
of telephone companies worldwide, regardless of the cable and transmission equipment they use, or the
equipment standards for the country they service.

“The cable farm is an absolute necessity for rapid development of cost-effective products for our customers,” says Bauer. “It will remove months from the product development cycle and help us significantly improve system performance much sooner than normal.”