T-Mobile Austria has selected MYCOM to help it expand its 4G LTE network.
Specifically, the operator will use MYCOM’s NIMS-PrOptima solution, which is designed to provide end-to-end performance management of mobile networks, including 2G/3G/4G LTE radio access, packet switching and circuit switching networks.
While rival Telekom Austria launched its 4G LTE network in February, T-Mobile Austria still requires more radio spectrum in order to launch its service, which it hopes to gain during the auction in September this year.
The LTE auction in Austria will see 28 blocks of spectrum up for grabs in the 800MHz, 900MHz and 1.8GHz bands.
At TM Forum Management World in Nice, MYCOM debuted the latest version of NIMS-PrOptima, Version 4, which can monitor and analyse data in five-minute granularity intervals, down from 15-minute intervals in its previous incarnation.
“Version 4 of our platform is able to handle 10 billion data records an hour. That’s a massive amount of big network data that you need to crunch in order to provide the ability to monitor and analyse data real-time,” MYCOM CTO Mounir Ladki told Mobile Europe.
“LTE is bringing added complexity to managing networks. LTE cannot function alone, you need to do traffic offload to Wi-Fi, HSPA [and] 3G. Networks are getting much more complex and generating a much greater amount of data to manage so the software must be scalable and carrier-grade.”
The NIMS-PrOptima platform is an off-the-shelf product that sits in the networks operation centre and doesn’t require open development on the customer’s premises, only customisation to the carrier’s needs.
It works with any type of LTE infrastructure from both traditional telco providers as well as the IT players, but most importantly, it offers the ability to provide cross-domain correlation.
MYCOM claims that it is the only company in the industry using cross-domain correlation to provide network management analytics.
“In order to provide end-to-end visibility to LTE, you can’t look at just one part of the network, i.e. the radio access or the core – you need to be able to manage the whole network and correlate the data from the backhaul, domains and services platform,” Ladki added.
“Most of the industry works in silos, looking at each domain separately, but you need to look at all of it together for LTE.”
In addition to offering insights into data in 5-minute intervals across the network, NIMS-PrOptima also offers automated solution identification, which can determine how a carrier’s network is behaving from monitoring the traffic and send out network adjustment configurations over a closed loop to cope with increased traffic.
“In order to be able to offer a differentiated customer experience, operators need to look quickly at services provided like social media and for example, a BlackBerry cloud enterprise service, and be able to drill down instantaneously into the network to fix problems and quickly restore quality of service,” said Ladki.