Telecom Equipment Vendors Editing and Proofreading Services

A vendor publishes a datasheet for a switching platform quoting a throughput figure in large type on the front page. A carrier designs a network around it, deploys, and finds real throughput roughly a third of the published number, because the quoted figure was measured with a single large frame size, all traffic on one card, and every feature the carrier actually needs switched off. The carrier's engineers were never told any of that, because the test conditions appeared nowhere in the document.

We edit what telecom equipment vendors produce — product datasheets and technical specifications, performance test reports and benchmark documentation, interoperability and conformance test results, installation and commissioning manuals, release notes and software upgrade guides, RFP and tender responses, end-of-life and migration notices, field service bulletins and known-issue advisories, and network design and dimensioning guides. Our editors work on the number a customer designs a network around.

The headline performance figure on a datasheet is what a customer builds a design on, and its failure is a number quoted without the test conditions that produced it. We work through these so every performance figure is stated with the conditions it was measured under — frame size, traffic pattern, feature set enabled, hardware configuration — rather than presented alone in large type, since a figure measured under conditions no deployment resembles is not a specification but an advertisement; so the performance with the features a customer will actually enable is given alongside the maximum, given that a platform rated at one throughput with everything off and a fraction of that with encryption and inspection running is describing two different products; so any figure representing a theoretical or aggregate capacity is labelled as such and distinguished from per-slot or per-interface limits, because a customer summing line-rate ports against a shared backplane arrives at a design that cannot work; so known limitations and interactions between features are stated in the same document as the capabilities, since a restriction discovered in a release note after deployment costs a redesign that a sentence in the datasheet would have prevented; and so the units and reference points are made explicit throughout, given that bits and bytes, per-second and per-direction, and full-duplex conventions differ across vendors and a customer comparing two datasheets is comparing whatever each one happened to mean. Datasheets written this way produce designs that survive contact with the network.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including product specifications, test data and customer documentation. We are editors rather than network engineers, test specialists or product architects, and we offer no view on performance claims, test methodology or product capability. What we can do is make sure a number arrives with the conditions that make it mean something.