Actix, a specialist in Network Status Management (NSM) solutions, has released a new RAN site acceptance solution. Based on the Actix One NSM platform, the new solution claims to reduce the time to accept deployed cell sites from weeks to just hours.
Mobile operators are faced with the multiple challenges of not only deploying completely new networks such as LTE, but also of infilling and upgrading existing network coverage. Suitable for large and small networks, the RAN site acceptance solution enables operators to more efficiently manage the process of deploying, infilling or upgrading cell sites, greatly reducing the time and cost of RAN site acceptance. Actix' site acceptance solution has already proven itself at the largest scale, reducing the time taken to deploy thousands of sites in a new network to just a few months. This was made possible by reducing the time taken to accept a new site from four weeks to just eight hours on average, with field measurements being distributed through a computing cloud to a team of hundreds of RF engineers in real time.
"It's a fallacy to think that a network is deployed once, and then that's that," said Sanjay Nagdev, Chief Sales Officer at Actix. "As urban landscapes change or old base station equipment needs upgrading, so operators need to constantly refresh their network coverage and bring new sites online. Even upgrading an existing site can take weeks because a fresh acceptance process must be undertaken simply because the environment around it will have changed since it was originally deployed. The new Actix RAN site acceptance solution not only means operators can now light up new sites much more quickly, but with reports now available via mobile devices such as the iPhone, network managers have the information they need to make better, faster decisions right at their fingertips."
The Actix One framework enables mobile network operators to implement large scale NSM technologies in their RAN engineering processes, and uses enterprise grade SOA architecture, databases and software sharing solutions such as Oracle 10g and Citrix to provide massively scalable solutions across large, widely distributed teams.