In what is the company’s largest single investment to date, RFI Global Services Ltd. has committed £3.6 million to establishing a state-of-the art cellular test facility in Korea. The brand new laboratories are scheduled to open in Summer 2006 and will be located in Gunpo near the country’s major handset manufacturers LG and Samsung, with easy access to Seoul.
The 6000 ft2 facility will be equipped with the latest test platforms from manufacturers including Anritsu, Aeroflex, Cetecom and Comprion. The first wave of equipment to be delivered will be the Anritsu ME7873F-10 3G RF conformance tester including RRM, multi-region support and HSDPA, a fully-loaded Aeroflex AIME/CT 6401 3G protocol tester, including InterRAT, a fully-loaded Aeroflex AIME/CT 6103 2G/2.5G protocol test platform, Cetecom’s MiNT quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE/AMR 2G/2.5GRF tester, a Setcom SCAT 5020 application tester and Comprion’s IT3 SIM/USIM simulator, together with further support equipment.
The initiative is a reflection of the growth in cellular terminal manufacturing and development in East Asia, which has resulted in 60 percent of RFI’s cellular testing demand now coming from Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China. Richard Jacklin, director and head of the company’s cellular business, said, “We have selected platforms that will provide RFI with the best test case coverage to offer Korean customers the benefit of local access to a first class lab with a globally recognized brand name. We are recruiting and expect to have 20 staff by end of the first year of trading.”