Voice Network Planning: Transition from a Technology to a Subscriber Focus

Subscribers are the most valuable assets of any Communication Service Provider. With increased market competitiveness, deregulation and the services brought on by wireline as well as mobile broadband, the key to business success is guaranteeing a high Quality of Experience for end users with minimal investment.  As a result of this, Service Providers are transitioning from a technology focus to subscriber-focused companies.

The capacity and reliability of the network determines the availability of Grade of Service and in turn, the subscriber’s Quality of Experience (QoE).  Misconfiguration or insufficient capacity of voice network resources leads to call blocking and call drops, reducing subscriber QoE.  In addition, new subscribers are immediately affected through service activation delays and congestion. 

Managing the cost of maintaining the right network configuration and capacity is a complex and ongoing challenge. With voice revenues under pressure, this challenge is exacerbated by the need to maintain a profitable service.  The cost-efficient management of voice delivery is now more important than ever.

Key Challenges in Planning a Voice Network

There are significant challenges in effectively planning voice networks. Network complexity has increased with the introduction and coexistence of new technologies and associated network elements with the current implementations. 

Manual capacity planning and optimization is tedious, error-prone and largely impracticable.  Planning cycles are long and accuracy of the analysis depends on the skill of the individual doing the plan. The inevitable management requests for what-if analysis are time consuming and often can’t be satisfied because of time pressure.

The Solution: Subscriber Demand Driven Voice Network Planning & Optimization

Communication Service Providers need a network capacity analysis, planning & optimization system that helps carriers optimally dimension and build their voice networks. One does this by providing an end-to-end network simulation and analysis environment based on “as-built” network resources and recommends the “as-planned” network based on future subscriber demand. They also need the ability to rapidly analyze “what-if” scenarios with different variations of the forecast demand.

The complexities in analyzing Call Detail Records (CDRs) and determining the traffic distribution patterns in the network are an essential part of network design and optimization but should be hidden to the planner, who can just execute a few simple steps to carry out “as-usual” network capacity planning activities in an automated way. The recommended network build and augmentation should meet the required Grade of Service and reliability criteria, thus providing right-sized network capacity with an optimal and cost-effective configuration.

This should also enable planning for cost-effective network migration, for example following a corporate merger activity or a significant network modification such as migration from a leased facility architecture from a 3rd party service provider to a completely internally-owned and run infrastructure. It should also provide intelligence on when to build or lease facilities based on unit cost.

Wanted: Faster, Efficient and Accurate Voice Network Planning

With a single collaborative environment across various organizations, this type of approach simplifies and enables rapid improvements in network capacity planning through the elimination of manual planning processes, which reduces errors and cycle time while increasing the quality of results. Thus, potential issues and bottlenecks are identified months in advance, enabling proactive rather than reactive network management.

It should enable a new build or augmentation of an existing network in an optimal manner, meeting needed Grade of Service and business rules. This type of proactive network plan can significantly reduce service activation delay and failure, thereby reducing time to market. It should empower service providers to realize significant capital and operational cost savings while guaranteeing rich Quality of Experience for its subscribers.

Russ Green is SVP, Product Management & Marketing, VPIsystems. He has 15 years of enterprise software experience in large-scale, high availability systems, working with globally-distributed development groups and customers. Before joining VPIsystems, Russ was the vice president of Development for 724 Solutions, based in Switzerland.