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MTN drives 3G, 2G network expansion

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb news editor.
Johannesburg, 14 Nov 2012
MTN is committed to offering its customer base a consistent, world-class network experience, says CTO Kanagaratnam Lambotharan.
MTN is committed to offering its customer base a consistent, world-class network experience, says CTO Kanagaratnam Lambotharan.

SA's second-biggest mobile operator, MTN, is expanding and enhancing its 3G and 2G networks.

The telco has implemented a software solution that it says will complement and expand its current operating efficiencies and assist in accelerating ongoing improvement of network quality indicators.

According to MTN, the solution - COPS-AIC software from Celcite, a provider of automatic optimisation tools and services for wireless networks - will also empower the mobile operator's engineers to manage the network more effectively.

MTN says the implementation forms part of its drive towards network expansion with the aim of continually evolving and enhancing its growing 2G and 3G networks to deliver invaluable customer experiences.

"MTN is committed to offering its customer base a consistent, world-class network experience," says Kanagaratnam Lambotharan, CTO at MTN SA. "Our planning and optimisation engineers will use the COPS-AIC software to gain foresight of challenges that the network may encounter and be able to counteract this proactively, thus improving efficiency on our network coverage."

Furthermore, he explains, this software implementation will allow MTN to automatically diagnose the root cause of any network issue experienced, and will discriminate between radio frequency and operational issues to improve focus and speed up issue resolution.

Lambotharan continues: "Investing in such optimisation tools empowers our engineers to be more proactive and solution-orientated, to ultimately improve efficiencies and demonstrate MTN's commitment to fulfilling its customer promise of service excellence always."

"MTN was looking for a tool to empower its engineers and further improve efficiencies," says Graham Kemp, Celcite's regional MD for Africa.

"As networks become more complex, with multiple bands and multiple carriers, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain and optimise these without the use of automation through intelligent correlation of diverse data sources.

"COPS-AIC will now enable MTN to further optimise its core 2G and 3G networks, giving it an even more stable base from which to roll out additional 3G capacity, and also in time, bandwidth to optimise its new LTE network as it is rolled out."

Lambotharan concludes: "We look forward to the efficiencies that the Celcite COPS-AIC solution will bring to our network today and into the future. Partnering with another world-class brand provides the confidence and value that this solution will bring improved and unique efficiencies and ultimately meet our business objective of excellent customer experience - which Africans all across the continent have come to expect from our brand."

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