’Sunrises’ Over O2 Mobile Data Management

Assessing the customer experience through network and service test and analysis tools is a concept in search of validation. The search had its perimeter narrowed recently as Telefonica O2 Germany began deploying Sunrise Telecom’s Mobile X-Ray mobile data services analysis platform.

Launched in April, the platform provides service monitoring and troubleshooting for O2’s growing data service program. O2 will utilize Sunrise Telecom’s Traffic Analysis and Monitoring System (TAMS) with the Mobile X-Ray application module, as well as the 3GMaster Probe/Protocol Analyzer for network monitoring and troubleshooting of new mobile data services. The combined solution can monitor and help an operator optimize the customer experience by intelligently correlating inputs from network, service, subscriber and device elements.

Konstantinos Sifakis, director at O2, said that compared to traditional voice services, mobile data services introduce a new set of complicated challenges for operators.

“Not only must we ensure high service quality from the customers’ perspective, but this must be done in a mixed-technology, mixed-protocol environment,” Sifakis said. He added that Sunrise Telecom has the tools to support this environment as well as a true understanding of the operational issues.

Sunrise Telecom is building on its existing relationship with O2 around optimizing its core mobile network. Telefónica O2 Germany GmbH & Co. OHG is part of Telefónica Europe. The company offers its German private and business customers postpaid and prepaid mobile telecom products as well as mobile data services based on the GPRS and UMTS technologies. Telefónica Europe has more than 43 million mobile and fixed network customers in Great Britain, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Germany.

“This is being done in multiple phases,” said Michele Campriani, general manager of Sunrise Telecom’s Protocol Products Group. “We have been helping O2 with core optimization and access optimization and monitoring. Only when you have those under control can you think about the services.”

Campriani said companies such as O2 are beginning to panic a little because the dam has broken and traffic is flooding their networks, which would be great were it not for their service offerings being priced at a flat rate.

“They are talking about a 10 percent increase in data traffic per day,” Campriani said. “They are panicking because they aren’t getting any more revenue out of it.”

He said Sunrise telecom tools can correlate the traffic and help operators understand what kind of traffic it is and find ways of prioritizing it in order to better monetize it.

For now, operators are not being aggressive in introducing sophisticated services they can’t charge for.