AT&T Mobility is seen by many as one of the most aggressive on the software front among domestic operators, bolstered by its history and connection with AT&T Labs. The carrier recently began touting a new program, dubbed service quality management, which is designed to allow for closer monitoring of network quality and service assurance.
According to AT&T Mobility, the SQM platform allows the operator to measure 1.9 billion “quality checkpoints” per day across its wireless network, and about 30 billion data measurements across both its wired and wireless operations. Those measurements are taken in “near real-time” allowing the operator to garner insight into potential issues.
The SQM platform includes several “tools,” including the Tower Outage and Network Analyzer that is designed to help the operator figure out which cell towers should be fixed first in order to deal with network issues impacting the greatest number of customers. AT&T Mobility said the TONA platform has created a 59% improvement in identifying customer impact.
The platform also includes its Mercury analytics tool that provides insight into the “health” of the network following planned maintenance; and a network topology tool that allows the operator to locate trouble spots in the network.
“Over the last few years we have been focused on enabling the operations team to monitor the end-to-end customer experience,” explained Jen Yates, assistant VP of technology research at AT&T Labs. “Historically, we looked more at performance from a device perspective, but now we want to focus more on the entire customer experience. This technology didn’t exist before so we focused on creating that technology.”
All of this network intelligence is being put to the test with AT&T Mobility’s rollout of voice over LTE services, with Yates noting that the carrier has a team of people specifically looking to ensure VoLTE service quality.
“VoLTE has been a driving factor in our move towards greater service assurance,” Yates explained. “We have really focused on VoLTE a lot over the past year and know that we need to get voice right as consumers have a certain expectation when it comes to voice services.”
RCR Wireless News recently released a report on the evolution of the service assurance market as well as conducted a webinar on the topic. Joining RCR Wireless News on the webinar were:
Thierno Diallo, Product Manager, Service Assurance Division, EXFO
Grant Castle, VP of Engineering, T-Mobile US
Anil Rao, Senior Analyst, Analsys Mason
Anand Gonuguntla, Co-founder and CEO, Centina Systems
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