Case Studies

Our team worked with a managed service supplier on a project to improve a leading US operators 3G Voice call KPIs following the introduction of more stringent performance criteria by the operator. Working alongside the RF and UTRAN support team, our staff helped identify and troubleshoot network capacity and configuration issues. Our team also interfaced directly with the UTRAN systems team to analyze and verify new parameter settings prior to network-wide deployment on the operators regional markets to ensure adverse side-effects on network quality was avoided.

A leading managed service supplier requested our team’s support during a network wide 3G RAN 6.1 software upgrade program. It was found that rescheduling of upgrades was commonplace resulting in a costly delay to market for new features for the mobile operator. Our team supported the network upgrade in troubleshooting any technical problems which were found on the night. Issues such as clearing of alarms, cells being brought back into service, KPI analysis, and resolution of legacy software issues were resolved quickly to ensure a smooth upgrade. The software upgrade was rolled out on time with significant reduction in rescheduling resulting in a major competitive advantage for the operator.

A leading European operator had an issue whereby MMS messages could not be sent by 3G handsets most commonly used by their leading business customers. The problem was causing lost revenue for the operator and frustrated premium rate business customers, increasing the likelihood of subscriber churn. A workaround solution was proposed which solved the problem by the RAN equipment supplier degrading the network performance via network re-configuration and allowing MMS transmission. However this solution was deemed unsuitable by the operator.

Our team worked on solving this issue by systematically diagnosing the cause of the problem. During the course of the investigation, our team discovered that it was a combination of problems surrounding encryption on both the UE and RAN equipment that was triggering the fault. With this analysis, both the RAN equipment supplier and handset (UE) vendor released software updates to resolve the problem which were quickly deployed across the network. Thanks to the thoroughness of the investigation, the final network solution also handled the legacy UEs in the network and so avoided a costly recall of UEs widely deployed in the network.

A leading U.S. operator raised a major issue whereby many subscribers were complaining of missing calls and that calls were diverting to voice mail even when customers were in areas of good coverage. As the core network had been recently upgraded, initial analysis pointed to the problem being a Core network issue. However, no specific core network problem could be identified and so further analysis was required. Our team undertook an analysis of the overload protection mechanism in the MSC which revealed that high over load was frequently being reported incorrectly by the RAN equipment. This is turn was causing the MSC RAN overload protection mechanism to reduce PAGING attempts to the RAN causing a lower paging success rate and in turn, a higher percentage of calls being diverted to voicemail. As a result of our team’s analysis, a problem in the RAN PAGING over-flow control mechanism was corrected and the problem was resolved completely.

A leading telecom vendor was tasked with deploying the latest release of their network software across several strategic nodes in a major U.S. operator’s network. One of their key concerns was to ensure that problems identified in previous software releases were not re-introduced as part of the latest FOA deployment. By working closely with the vendor’s development engineers, our team helped verify the FOA software quality prior to deployment. This was achieved through several main activities.

1. Working with the software release procedures to make sure solutions to all existing problems reported by the operator were mapped into the new FOA software before deployment.
2. Ensuring a dedicated support team was in place to troubleshoot any unforeseen problems, perhaps caused by new functionality introduced in the FOA release.
3. Base-lining several network KPIs before and after the new FOA deployment to ensure that all network performance targets were met. This also ensured that any problems reported at the FOA sites did not exist prior to the FOA upgrade and so could be handled as new configuration issues unrelated to the FOA deployment.

Our team has shown innovation in test suite design and implementation. A legacy test suite used for telecom signaling protocols involved time consuming manual changing of scripts for individual protocol parameters. This resulted in untraceable libraries of test scripts.

Our team managed a rethink and redesign of the test suite libraries. In its place, a web based script was developed with all protocol parameters included. A simple selection of the parameter to be tested resulted in automatic generation of a test script.

The redevelopment of the testing process was concluded inside one test cycle, with future testing cycle times reduced by over 50%.