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Carriers are seeking service assurance solutions that get more out of their current network designs.

To support affordable wireless Internet access, new technologies are necessary to increase Capacity of individual cell sites, thereby requiring fewer new cells. These new technologies include the latest radio designs and air interfaces, but new hardware is not enough. A wireless service assurance solution must emerge to provide growth and performance management if the promise of these new hardware platforms is to be fully realized.

The wireless industry grew at an incredible rate in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Carriers struggled to keep up with subscriber demand and were forced to add cell sites rapidly--at any expense. As a result, capital efficiency and the overall service quality offered by the majority of carrier networks were overlooked.

Wireless networks were designed and tested with tools that focused primarily on estimating cell site coverage and were not tuned to run at optimal capital efficiency; because the industry was young and competition was limited, network inefficiencies had little overall impact on revenue growth.

Today, the situation has changed dramatically. With voice traffic at an all-time high, huge capacity demands have been placed on wireless networks. According to The Strategis Group, there will be more than 530 million wireless subscribers worldwide by 2001. New estimates report that the number of wireless subscribers will break the 1 billion mark by 2004, and a substantial portion of the telephones sold that year will have multimedia capabilities.

To keep up with growing demand for wireless Internet access, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is being introduced. WAP is the de facto worldwide standard for providing moderate bandwidth Internet communications and advanced telephony services on digital mobile phones, pagers, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other wireless terminals. Handset manufacturers representing 90 percent of the world market across all technologies have committed to shipping WAP-enabled devices.

Early evidence suggests that this commitment will provide millions of WAP browser-enabled products to consumers by the end of 2000. In Japan, for example, cell phone maker N'JT DoCoMo's Internet-capable phones have an estimated 2 million users after about a year on the market.

The Challenge

In response to market demand, carriers are deploying capacity faster than at any other time in history. Capacity demand will be even greater with wireless Internet access. Wireless carriers must keep up with network capacity and quality requirements at the lowest possible cost to stay competitive.

How can a carrier keep up with market demand when prices keep going down and cell sites are getting harder to get past zoning boards? A critical part of the answer lies in the implementation of a service assurance solution.

Managing Interference

Service assurance is the implementation of processes and methodologies that allow wireless carriers to provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS). Managing network growth is a big part of a complete wireless service assurance solution. The quickest and cheapest way for a wireless carrier to grow its network is to boost the capacity of each individual cell site without degrading call quality. This means fewer new cell sites must be built, reducing new capacity cost and time to market. To understand the impact, consider a national wireless network with a multibillion dollar annual capacity-expansion budget. Increasing the average capacity of existing and new cell sites by just 20 percent will result in hundreds of millions of dollars in carrier savings.

All cellular and PCS networks achieve capacity by reusing radio frequencies between cell sites. Frequency reuse means that cell sites using the same radio

frequencies will interfere with each other if their radio waves overlap. This interference is normal and managing it is at the core of wireless network design and optimization.

Each cell site's capacity is limited by the amount of interference it receives from surrounding cell sites using the same radio frequency. Reducing intercell site interference increases the capacity that can be provisioned. The key is identifying cell sites that are limiting capacity and then developing a specific solution to change the size of their radio frequency footprints. Frequently, this means either adjusting the height of the cell site antennae or possibly installing different antennae.

To survive the continuing onslaught of wireless traffic, carriers must be able to confidently and accurately isolate, identify and resolve capacity and call quality issues in their networks. Existing techniques have only exacerbated the problem. Until recently, carriers used computer-based propagation models to plan their networks and place cell sites. These models can't accurately predict or identify capacity-robbing network interference. Furthermore, there is no real way to accurately predict system performance as a function of increased traffic. Customer complaints about blocked and dropped calls are usually the first sign of trouble, and by then it's often too late to save the customer relationship.

Measured Network Data

As simple as it sounds, measured network data is not that easy to implement. Its use plays an integral role in providing carriers a level of accuracy in wireless network planning not currently available through traditional data collection methods. Measured network data includes accurate measurements of RF path loss data, cell site configuration and switch parameter settings. With this data, carriers can more accurately determine how planned network changes will affect overall capacity, call quality and company profits.

The process of collecting measured network data is difficult for many wireless carriers. It means sending specially equipped trucks into the field to collect accurate source data from multiple locations at different times of the day. To relieve carriers of this burden and to give them more time to work on network planning, some companies now offer data acquisition as a managed service.

Once accurate source data is gathered, it can be analyzed and fundamental design metrics can be applied to help wireless carriers determine how a new network configuration will perform before they implement it. Carriers should be able to "score" their networks in terms of both service-quality and capital efficiency.

The ability to evaluate network performance in this manner feeds directly into service assurance implementation by helping carriers:

* Increase capacity by adding more voice paths per cell using their existing network infrastructure;

* Identify capacity-limiting cell sites so they can be addressed immediately;

* Lower capital cost by using standardized metrics that make capital planning across an organization easier and more accurate.

Cellular network management offers several additional benefits. Procedures that required weeks or months now take days. An engineer's art is now a management science. A narrow engineering problem is now maximized into a broad business management challenge that affects capital costs, profit margins and market share.

The potential payoff of implementing the right service assurance solution can be enormous. With multibillion dollar network growth budgets, national wireless carriers can literally save hundreds of millions of dollars in capital costs while ensuring a high level of customer satisfaction.

Eric Jensen is CEO of ScoreBoard Inc., which he co-founded in 1993. Earlier, Jensen worked at PSINet, Sun Microsystems and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a master's in engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. (ehj@scoreboardinc. com)