In the competitive wireless industry, carriers are faced with an almost impossible task: bringing more customers in the door through attractive marketing programs while at the same time addressing the attendant capacity and quality issues as inexpensively as possible.
To help carriers accomplish this task, Schema Group Ltd., an Israel-based company that provides telecom resource-management software and services for the wireless industry, introduced its Falcom product, designed to help carriers solve bandwidth-scarcity problems.
The company will demonstrate the product next week at the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association’s Wireless 2000 convention in New Orleans.
The concept behind the product is to take data from a carrier’s network and process it in such a way that the carrier is presented with a variety of options for tackling its capacity and service-quality issues. Instead of building an entirely new infrastructure to meet capacity and quality demands, carriers could deploy a combination of new and colocated equipment, saving money in the process, said the company.
In addition, by improving quality of service to reduce churn by only 1 percent a month, carriers can save millions of dollars each year, said the company.
Falcom, which stands for fast adaptive learning channel optimization modules, is technology-agnostic and combines an optimization engine and a data-mining platform to produce descriptions of network performance. The product uses sophisticated mathematical algorithms to allow wireless providers to increase system capacity and improve service quality by maximizing the performance of existing infrastructure.
The product currently consists of two pieces: Falcom Builder and Falcom Planner. Falcom Builder is a tool that allows wireless carriers to automatically create accurate multilayer impact matrix data based on a variety of data sources and on information residing in networks, including drive-test results, computer-generated propagation predictions and operational channel loading statistics. Using the impact matrices generated by Falcom Builder, as well as user-defined limitations and requirements, Falcom Planner generates optimal channel-allocation plans for wireless networks.
In field trials, the company’s optimization system improved network efficiency by 20 percent to 50 percent, said Schema.
