Successful feature trials and rollout across various vendors

A Tier-1 group telecom company with a regional presence in the Americas collaborated with Aspire to enhance its network capabilities across its three RAN network vendors and improve network performance by testing and deploying a set of newly available features before rolling out the new software network-wide.

Aspire’s project team planned and run the trial of more than 40 features in total from all vendors. The plan was to trial several features per week and subsequently roll out those that demonstrated significant improvements across all markets. It also included baselining all features across the various vendors, creating a consistent behaviour and harmonized approach across all vendors, and a phase in which experts from Aspire tuned those features ensuring the best possible performance for each individual feature and in its totality considering all features, thus maximizing the benefits to our client and to end users. The results were impressive, according to our client.

For the Vendor 1 region, the total downlink data volume increased by 18%, with a slight improvement in throughput, meaning a lot more traffic was carried without impacting performance. Moreover, the introduction of Voice service optimization led to a remarkable 37% improvement in 3G Radio Resource Control (RRC) setup time, which is still an important technology for our client.

For the Vendor 2 region, the trials resulted in a 10% increase in total downlink data volume, also with around 5% improved throughput.

As for Vendor 3, the E-UTRAN Radio Access Bearer (ERAB) drop rate improved by an impressive 73%, while throughput improved in UL by 17% and 27% in DL. In addition, latency decreased by 12.82%, which was all in all an outstanding improvement.

The next steps include preparing for the software upgrades and rolling out the features with the Aspire recommended tuning. A clean-up process to resolve possible inconsistencies was also planned with an existing Aspire Software solution, which will work in a closed-loop and avoid future inconsistencies being introduced by the various teams managing the network.

The project has brought numerous benefits to the customer’s network and their end users, and with continued joint efforts and activities, we aim to enhance customer experience further in all countries our client operates in.