With the growing pressure on operators to manage their networks effectively to improve efficiency and capacity, automatic tools for cell planning and optimisation are becoming increasingly important. A number of vendors have made recent announcements both about products and about partnerships with operators and vendors, and among others they are expected to make their mark at next week's Mobile World Congress. LTE has brought new design challenges, which include features such as MIMO, multiple frequency bands, variable bandwidths and adaptive coding and modulation, which all have a significant impact on the business case for LTE deployment.
Automatic cell planning (ACP) tools specialist Symena announced last week that it has delivered its Capesso LTE planning tool to eight of the top ten LTE equipment vendors, for use in designing the next generation of radio networks. The Capesso LTE suite is being used to design networks in Europe, Asia and North America, in conjunction with partner tools ATOLL from Forsk and Mentum Planet. The Symena offering also includes Greenfield, a fast radio network design and dimensioning tool, and a self organising networks (SON) configuration server, SONnovo.
Celcite last week announced the immediate availability of its Centralised Maintenance and Optimisation Centre (CMOC), which enables mobile operators to manage and optimise their networks remotely on a day-to-day basis, and provides the means for managed services providers to reduce OPEX, increase efficiencies and provide centralised skills centres for multi-vendor networks. At the same time, Celcite also announced that a major wireless Tier 1 operator in the USA has engaged with it to utilise CMOC for the remote management and optimisation of one of its networks, and is providing a cost effective way for the operator to monitor the network and manage pre-launch, post-launch and ongoing optimisation from a single unified platform and a optimisation centre.
Celcite will be using both CMOC and its multi-vendor, multi-technology tool suite COPS to perform maintenance and optimisation of the operator's network from a remote centre. The CMOC team will undertake the overall optimisation of the network to meet or improve the target KPIs, including activities such as root cause analysis, network compliance checks, discrepancies checks, audits, traffic and layer management, neighbour optimisation, interference analysis and resolution of problem areas, including script generation where required. Daily and hourly monitoring based on alarms, configuration changes and KPI degradation will also be performed.
Meanwhile Aircom International, who will be making announcements at the Show, last week reiterated in a blog post its estimate for operators in some parts of the world to deploy LTE networks would require a CAPEX investment of $8 billion US in the first 3 - 5 years. It added that not having the right strategy and roadmap could cost operators an additional 20% to compensate for poor planning, roll out and launch of their LTE network. Aircom believes that the cost of running an additional technology such as LTE in an existing network could add another 30% to the operator's OPEX costs, although careful planning, management and optimisation could reduce this to as little as 9 - 12%.
