Wireless carriers have special network analysis requirements that traditional telecom vendors don’t fulfill – that’s the pitch from Velocent Systems, a startup formed by Bell Labs alumni.

“We thought it’d be quite a challenge to meet the expectations of users.  At the same time, there was some new deep-packet inspection technology that became available,” said CEO and founder Bruce Peterson of Velocent’s agenda. “We developed a session engine that can look at every packet going through the network,” now called the Velocent Session Engine 2000, he said.

The product became available last summer and has four modules for inserting test packets, analyzing cell sites, viewing user trends and looking at device management. Next week, Velocent will announce its first customer – “a very large European operator,” Peterson said – which bought the customer experience module.  “Within 2 days, they found a revenue-generating server had congestion on that link of over 10% which meant that 20% of the messages were being dropped,” he explained.

Velocent also is currently starting trials with a Tier 1 U.S. carrier and two companies in the U.K., to be announced at the Management World event in Nice, France, on May 20, Peterson said.

The company in Naperville, Ill., has $4 million in funding and 12 employees.  Its out-of-band VSE 2000 system costs about 50 cents per subscriber.

Velocent’s emphasis on the end-user experience is smart because few other companies offer that, said IDC analyst Shira Levine.