How much much do companies spend for Automated Test solutions for Protocol Conformance / Functionality / Performance Testing for Carrier Ethernet Network Devices?

A question for a question.

Why buy "carrier ethernet" specific test systems at all?

When all said and done carrier Ethernet is adapted from Enterprise standards......

Anyhow rest of this is about lab tests - depending on how i take your question you might be asking about test gear for commissioning, troushooting etc.

But the quick and dirty answer is - many companies dont spend enough on test gear until they have their fingers burned.

FWIW we use Spirent and Agilent "stuff" for packet type conformance tests which were picked for the initial use of MPLS and other IP services. If you need to dig deep into what happens at bit level within a packet then engineers still tend to dig out Sniffer and Wireshark.

In this context automation is limited - since you dont often repeat exactly the same testing (apart from whenever the prodcution equipment suppliers send out upgrades of course).

Since we have a mix of ethernet flavours, have Ethernet over fibre, SDH, and L2 / L3 MPLS providing services we want test gear to be generic enough it can be used for L2 and L3 testing, MPLS core etc.

1 of the persistent issues with any sort of testing is trusting the test equipment enough to decide whether you have a real issue or a testing problem and that pushes people towards test gear they have used before and are already comfortable with, or related equipment with a similar GUI etc.

That in turn makes for some vendor / equipment type loyalty for the test gear.

None of these substitue for a "real" test using the deployed applications or specialised equipment - some things are not worth the hassle or too wierd to try to model. So our lab has audio and video codecs in it for testing real time traffic broadcast traffic - mainly for the console reporting in some specialised uses.