Visit to Virgin’s Digital Test Lab

Careium’s technical team this week visited Virgin’s digital test lab in Wokingham to test analogue and digital telecare alarms. Gary Clark, Technical Director and Simon Clark, Technical Manager, spend two days testing equipment that is deployed in our customer’s homes, over the next generation telephone networks.

The Careium team at the Virgin Test Labs

Virgin Media established its dedicated test lab so that suppliers can bring in examples of devices in order to test over their phone lines (both using old and new technologies) to assess compatibility. The lab offers:

  • The ability for providers or manufacturers of special service equipment to connect to either 21CV products of Direct Exchange Line (DEL) for residential customers and or Business Exchange Line (BEL) for enterprise customers.
  • Multiple line appearances to cover the different termination equipment within Virgin Media’s network: – VOIP lines off our new 21CV network, residential & business – PSTN lines off our current traditional network – Broadband
  • Providers or manufacturers to originate alert calls to their own production test Alarm Reporting Centre (ARC), Network Access Controller (NAC) either remotely or locally.

Gary Clark said that although test centres like these may not fully reflect telecare devices journeys through these networks (due to the many variables), it does provide Careium with a reference point. And one that reinforces the need to move to digital solutions that are better suited to these modern networks. These continued visits to test labs, including 4 visits to Openreach digital test centre in Kings Cross, are to reassure and support our customers on their A2D journey demonstrating our knowledge and experiences.

Careium is a market-leading technology-enabled care company, we’re the main provider of innovative end-to-end digital solutions and services in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and the UK. In the UK our alarm receiving centre uses a digital platform UMO, interoperable with hundreds of devices. We provide a wide range of services from monitoring call handling to field engineering, responder services and out-of-hours services. We offer technology agnostic solutions which are tailored to end users’ needs. Read more.