With the commercial availability of new, modern 3G handsets, UMTS operators across Europe are noticing a steady increase in customer adoption of their mobile devices and in consumption of the advanced mobile services they offer.

While the upswing in device adoption and the consumption of advanced services are surely positive and promising trends for any UMTS operator, they bring about two of the most challenging aspects of 3G-network design and engineering: assuring top network quality while maintaining cost effectiveness in UMTS-coverage rollouts. If budgets were unlimited, operators would simply lay down UMTS sites everywhere, but because that is not the case, operators must predict usage, traffic hot spots for UMTS and likely areas for the best user experience. Assuring premium network quality while controlling costs are two goals that are interdependent and yet conflicting. They beg the question of how an operator can do more with less investment and improve network quality.

Traditional 3G-coverage rollouts were designed with “proven” ROI in mind, such that when 3G operators rolled out voice coverage and low-bandwidth data traffic, they had their GSM network to build upon. City centers, business parks and high-traffic areas were deployed in early phases, while lower-traffic areas and residential and rural locations received 3G coverage much later, if at all. This rollout logic is perfectly suitable for the “2G”-oriented business world, but it doesn’t necessarily apply to the new facts and the consumer behavior of the “3G” era. If 3G is all about new services, highbandwidth downloads and streaming data, is it really to be deployed and consumed in the same high-traffic spots as traditional GSM voice services?

An effective introduction of 3G poses several provocative questions: What is the best way to assess consumer behavior and demand? Do we have different service-type usage patterns in different areas? And, finally, how can we optimize network resources assuring customer experience and quality of service? We should also bear in mind the fact that because traffic volumes are constantly growing with user adoption and increased usage, it is hard to predict hot-spot areas for UMTS.

In an operator’s GSM network, there are millions of subscribers, traffic all over the country, measurements of quality, and a lot of data. Conversely, UMTS operators have none of the subscribers, none of the traffic and a lot of guesswork to do.

When analyzing where to deploy the network, where to increase investment and where to allocate resources for new sites, operators can’t follow the old GSM model. They cannot be certain that the highest-traffic areas for GSM – namely, business areas – will be identical for UMTS. Perhaps UMTS will see its greatest adoption with children, teens and young adults, around schools and college campuses? How will operators project traffic hot spots and optimize the network so that UMTS can piggyback on their 2G network?

“Smart” network planning will take advantage of the interoperability of the two networks. The interoperability of the networks can be leveraged, enabling UMTS customers to fall back on the GSM network when 3G coverage or quality is compromised. The opposite is true as well. Customers who experience problems with the GSM network, mainly capacity and data-service bandwidth, will be able to rely on the UMTS network. Accounting for the interoperability of the two networks, along with accurate traffic analysis, will help operators control the costs of network planning.

By using busy-hour tabulation, an operator can easily identify its “traffic hot spots” – usually the business parks and city centers. But since this is a “2G methodology,” it will identify traditional voice-service hot spots. It will not suffice to determine the high-data-traffic information that is so important to UMTS, nor will it make projections that account for different user demographics and service-adoption rates.

The most appropriate solution, which is a unique evolving technology, is to collect advanced quality-of-service reports – “mobile measurements” – from existing 3G terminals. These reports provide valuable information with which supporting tools create realtime, accurate traffic and service-coverage maps, positioning of dropped-calls hot spots, and terminal-type quality analysis.

Combining mobile measurements from both 2G and 3G-network layers enables optimal designing of the layers’ interoperability, handovers and coverage.

By using mobile measurements, service providers can finally be in constant touch with their users’ real customer experience, assuring optimal network design at the right time, at the right place and for the right services. 3GWB

Gur Lavie is director of product marketing at Schema.

For more information, see http://www.schema.com/index.asp.

Credit: 3G Wireless Broadband