The University of New Hampshire‘s (UNH) InterOperability Lab (IOL) wears two hats.
First, it serves as a third party testing house for technology companies looking to have their products certified by the AVnu Alliance.
What is the AVnu Alliance?
The AVnu Alliance is a community creating an interoperable ecosystem of low-latency, time-synchronized, highly reliable synchronized networked devices using open standards through certification.
Second, it employs students to test those products and give them a leg up in the engineering industry.
The IOL as a Testing House
As a third party testing space, UNH’s IOL is used to test products manufactured by technology companies across the globe. These companies submit their products to be tested in order to be stamped and certified with the AVnu Alliance’s logo.
The AVnue Alliance’s certified stamp indicates that a particular product is interoperable with other certified technologies within a network or ecosystem.
What is AVB & TSN?
AVB/TSN (Audio Video Bridging/Time Sensitive Networking) is an open standard allowing any vendor to support it. However, an open standard alone doesn’t guarantee interoperability between an ecosystem of products. Independent certification, such as through the AVnu Alliance, is key to ensuring interoperability between devices and a no-compromise A/V network that is easier and less expensive to implement.
Companies bring in products and systems of all kinds for testing, including WiFi, cable, storage, time-sensitive electronics, consumer electronics and DSL.
The tests are done in order to determine if a product complies by Audio Video Bridging/Time Sensitive Networking standards. If a set of products comply by these standards and passes the tests run at the IOL, they are deemed interoperable and become AVnu Alliance-certified.
AVnu Certification is the first and only open, third party, independent compliance and interoperability certification for media networking in the A/V industry. The AVnu Alliance has created a robust and comprehensive compliance and interoperability certification program to ensure interoperability across a broad ecosystem of A/V devices across the network infrastructure.
“Certification of any standards-based technology is important for three reasons,” says Gary Stuebing, AVnu Alliance President (in a previous statement). “First, it ensures that what is being produced adheres to the standards the certification is built on. Second, it ensures that equipment will work together. And third, certification means multiple vendors are in the market, which positively impacts the price to the end user.”
When a company wants a product tested at the IOL, it sends that product to the corresponding department in the lab.
“AVnu decides the functionality of a test, and those tests are documented,” says Greg Schlechter, Consumer Electronics Segment Chair of AVnu, Marketing Workgroup Chair, Intel. “At the end of the test you get the results, as long as [that product] passes. Then, it’s given to the AVnu Alliance for a logo. With the end results [and with the logo], end users and integrators can say “ok, this is my requirement,” and can say that they’re AVnu certified. They can have confidence in some amount of testing.”
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