5G radio planning, on top of an existing 2G/3G/4G network
Customer
A major Tier 1 US Operator with an existing 2G, 3G and 4G network plans to have 5G coverage in 30 cities by the end of 2019, and nationwide 5G coverage by the end of 2020.
Challenge
Our customer’s initial challenge was that their network planning tool was not able to keep up with growth. Aside from its scalability issues, it also lacked critical Enterprise security features and couldn’t integrate with the rest of their network operations ecosystem of tools.
TEOCO’s Solution
A loyal ASSET customer for the past ten years, this operator maintains a centralized nationwide deployment of the ASSET Suite for all users, nationwide. The system has, on average, 250 concurrent users – all making changes and synchronizing them back to the carrier’s central database at any given time. The initial installation of ASSET was to provide coverage for their GSM and UMTS networks. This was later expanded to cover LTE. Their network has continued to evolve, and they recently began leveraging ASSET’s 5G planning tools, at scale, to plan their commercial 5G network rollout.
Over the years this ASSET deployment has undergone a number of changes, namely the addition of MYRIAD to improve prediction accuracy. Distributed Predictions provide the ability to process over 500 parallel pathloss predictions, creating coverage computations more quickly, and at massive scale. We have also added ARRAYWIZARD, for populating coverage maps on their website. Another key component of the system is ASSET Update, which imports changes from their live network, so planning engineers are always working from the latest network configuration data.
The final step in deploying the solution was to ensure it could integrate with the carrier’s downstream tools for other services, including: coverage checking, site acquisition, rehoming, GIS, E911 and Inventory. This was made possible by TEOCO’s EDS API, which allowed the customer to link data from across all their systems. In addition to using ASSET for radio planning, this carrier has also been a long-time user of ASSET Backhaul for transmission planning.
Value Generated
“The seamless integration of ASSET with our existing software and systems will ensure the benefits we enjoy across our GSM and UMTS networks can be easily applied to our LTE infrastructure” – September 2012.
“We’re hugely excited by the arrival of 5G technology and are making all necessary investments to ensure our 5G service is the envy of all other service providers. We have a longstanding, valued relationship with TEOCO. It is a company that has intimate knowledge of our network, having worked with us through several technology upgrades already. It was therefore a very easy decision to entrust the planning of our 5G infrastructure to TEOCO and its ASSET Radio planning tool.” – February 2019