ProVision Communications has released an enhanced version of its WiMAX network site optimisation tool ProSite. Dr. Nicolas Lodge, CEO of ProVision Communications, said the planing tool enables WiMAX networks to be much more accurately planned, resulting in a reduction in the number of base stations required.
“This has obvious competitive benefits to WiMAX vendors when bidding on large contracts by reducing their base station costs by as much as 20%, and at the same time lowers contract risk by increasing confidence in the precise number and location of base stations needing to be deployed” he said.
The tool works from an initial list of sites known to be available to avoid theoretical solutions containing unobtainable sites, and considers both technical and financial data to select the minimum and lowest cost subset of sites that meet a particular user defined coverage and/or capacity requirement.
To assist in planning the growth of an existing network as well as for an entirely new, the user-supplied list of possible sites can contain existing sites which must be included in the final optimised solution.
Financial costs (such as equipment rental and operating costs) are considered alongside technical data (e.g. sector transmit powers, total capacity, frequency assignment etc.) for each site.
Subscriber locations can be loaded from a file or manually specified using the supplied GUI. The network planner can specify the requested traffic level (data rates) for subscribers, as well as the unit charge for the traffic type (i.e. cost per Mb of traffic). This enables ProSite to estimate the potential revenue for each optimised solution.