Accelerate Technology Rollout

Mobile Network Congestion is Driving New Technology Rollouts.

With the rise of the mobile internet, the mobile network has become a source of critical performance and capacity bottlenecks. The two major sources of the bottlenecks are capacity limitations in the radio link and base station backhaul. Upgrading backhaul with Ethernet, fiber and microwave technology will take time but will eventually remove backhaul as a key bottleneck. That will leave the radio link as the key capacity bottleneck in the mobile network. On top of that, the mobile data performance of today’s 3G radio link technologies falls far short of the fixed line experience mobile internet users desire.

The mobile network is the performance and capacity bottleneck for data services

The good news is that new radio network technologies such as HSPA+ and LTE improve both capacity and performance at the same time, with LTE delivering the greatest capacity and performance improvements. In addition, new HSPA sites and carriers can be used to effectively increase data network capacity.

As a result, aggressive rollouts of new HSPA sites and carriers and HSPA+ technology are well underway and more than 100 LTE rollouts are underway or planned over the next several years. With data demand projected to lead to a 40x increase in traffic by 2014, this rollout trend is expected to persist for the next 10 years as HSPA+ and then LTE rolls out globally.

Mobile Network Optimization is on the Critical Path of Rollouts.

The first step in any radio network technology rollout is capital and cell planning, which ensures business and technical objectives are met with minimum allocation of capital. However, with complex planning tradeoffs to be evaluated across thousands of existing sites, traditional manual planning approaches have become too slow and expensive to meet tight launch timelines in today’s budgetary environment. This leads to a key challenge: finding ways to automate the planning process, accelerating it while also minimizing resources. Furthermore, achieving an optimal plan has the potential to substantially reduce capital expenditures.

Once the planning phase is complete, network equipment needs to be installed and configured. The surprising truth about new network technology rollouts is that the critical path to launch usually isn’t the installation of software or hardware upgrades: it’s the troubleshooting and optimization of the network prior to launch. This pre-launch network optimization is critical to ensuring technology upgrades will deliver high quality data services at launch. In addition, it ensures performance and capacity objectives will be consistently met across the network.

Accelerate Your Technology Rollout with Actix Optimization Solutions.

Actix has 20 years of experience in accelerating pre-launch network planning and optimization, from automated cell planning to contractually-based network acceptance reporting. Our solutions are proven to automate key tasks by 20x, while assuring best-practice approaches are uniformly applied.