Category: Solution updates

Product update: “Radio Testing as a Service” – successful cloud-based INOS installation in Intel Lab

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Digis Squared’s team complete INOS migration from local on-premises deployment to first cloud-based installation enabling “Radio Testing as a Service”, with Intel® Xeon® Gold 6338N Processor, in the Intel Lab.

Thanks to membership of Intel Network Builders, work undertaken in the Intel Lab has enabled the Digis Squared team to run INOS over the Intel® Xeon® Gold 6338N processor, in the first cloud-based installation of INOS. This work is the first step in our assessment of INOS as a cloud-based solution with Intel processors. Further work is planned with the Intel Lab team assessing other enhanced processors and benchmarking performance enhancement.

Yasser Elsabrouty, Digis Squared Chief Business Officer and Co-Founder said, “Thanks to Intel Network Builders and membership of Intel Winners Circle, INOS is now providing Radio Testing automation over the cloud, enabling “Radio Testing as a Service” over private or public cloud.  The cognitive testing tool can seamlessly manage large amounts of data in a multi-tenant environment, providing full automation and real-time reporting.”

“Delivering INOS Testing as a Service over the cloud will increase efficiency, convenience and scalability, delivering the instant capability to run thousands of radio network tests from anywhere, anytime, in combination with smart automation, real-time reports and KPI deviation alerts. Digis Squared’s cognitive INOS tool just became a whole lot smarter!”

Intel® Xeon® Gold 6338N processor

  • 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors (formerly “Ice Lake”)
  • 10nm technology, 32 cores, 64 threads, 3.6GHx max turbo frequency, full specification.

Benefits & observations

Running 25 INOS Radio Field Tests in the Intel Lab, the following enhancements were measured, and benefits observed,

1. Increased cores & threads

  • The Intel® Xeon® Gold 6338N processor enabled Digis Squared to setup 2 or more parallel INOS containers serving two (o more) different customer accounts. In the field, this extra capability enabled by the Intel® Xeon® Gold 6338N processor would mean that,
    • More copies of INOS modules can run together in parallel, providing higher processing capability
    • Lower response time and faster handling for APIs and web requests
    • Duplicating INOS running modules presents high availability
  • When assessing response time across all 25 tests, the results show that the Intel® Xeon® Gold 6338N easily handles the volume of data as data payload increases x2.5 over the 25 tests.

2. Max Turbo Frequency: the INOS platform receives high traffic bursts periodically, due to the nature of telecoms. The increased max turbo frequency of the Intel Xeon processor empowers INOS to handle these bursts without any probability of outage.

3. Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 Frequency: Increases the capability of INOS to receive big sudden bursts of requests, keeping stable progress and high performance (i.e. no delay on data retrieval, no delay on rendering data to maps and tables, and reduced time to prepare reports.)

4. Number of UPI links: INOS consumes a huge volume of processor capability and RAM. To optimise INOS performance, we are looking not just for capacity of the processor, but also how this processor chip interconnects with the rest of the system components. The Intel® Xeon® Gold 6338N presents better integration with various I/O devices reflecting in INOS performance, especially when handling large bursts of input data files.

5. Max memory size: For INOS, more memory means more concurrent users, more software threads running in parallel, and an increase in the number of docker containers running simultaneously. The increased max memory size indicated in this table will deliver at least three or more times the number of INOS containers when using the Intel® Xeon® Gold 6338N.

6. Intel® AES-NI & Intel® Trusted Execution Technology: INOS SW runs on sensitive client data, and this capability will save data from any corruption and violation trials.

Conclusions & next steps

Having successfully completed this first assessment with the Intel Lab, the Digis Squared team are confident in the deployment of INOS as a cloud-based solution utilising Intel® Xeon® Gold processors, delivering optimised performance and enhanced speeds.

Yasser concluded, “Further work is planned with the Intel Lab team assessing other enhanced processors and measuring performance enhancement, and then, mutual testing with Open RAN market leaders!”

If you or your team would like to discover more about our capabilities, please get in touch: use this link or email sales@DigisSquared.com .

Discover more

Digis Squared, independent telecoms expertise.

Wangiri Fraud Case Study

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Digis Squared Chief Business Officer, Yasser Elsabrouty shares a Wangiri Fraud Case Study, a growing and costly type of telecom fraud.

“Fraud in the telecommunications industry has serious impacts on operator finances, brand value, and most importantly, subscriber trust and relations,”  shares Yasser. “In this blog, I’ll review the scale of the issue and its impacts, illustrate how Wangiri fraud is undertaken, and share a little on what we’re doing for clients to detect and prevent this fraud.”

How large is fraud in the telecoms sector?

Public data on the scale of the issue is understandably limited. The Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA) publish a Fraud Loss Survey every 2 years, the most recent was November 2019 [1]. They estimate that over US$ 28 billion of telecom operator revenue was lost to fraud, 1.74%.

Global telecom revenues & fraud [2]

In the finance field, fraud is considered an annual financial risk that requires attention to detect and prevent future losses, especially when such losses keep increasing as more time passes and fraudsters become more confident, creative and daring in committing those fraud schemes.

Wangiri Fraud

Wangiri is a callback scam. Its name has its origins in a Japanese word which means “one ring and cut”.

UK Regulator OfCom [3]: “These are calls in which the scammer will ring a person’s phone number but immediately hang up in the hope that the recipient will call back.
If the person calls the number back, they will then find themselves connected to an expensive number, such as an international number, which will be charged at a premium rate. This can leave them facing a costly charge for the call.”

“Considering this in a little more detail, in Wangiri, a fraudster gives a missed call to several victim’s phone number, usually randomly dialled and in different countries, from an international or unusual number. To the user, the CLI, caller number ID, is modified in such a way that it may look like a genuine call. When the victim naively calls back out of curiosity, they will discover later that they have called a premium rate service, PRS, number owned by the fraudster for which the victim is charged heavily for the calls. The fraudster intends to keep the victim on hold for as long as possible to increase the billed amount. The premium rate service provider pays the fraudster a certain share of the call revenue for each minute of call received by the premium rate number.”

“When customers discover the charges on their bills, and talk with their operator, most refund the call cost to the client. This takes time and effort for the operator, and impacts reputation and brand trust. And of course, in the mean time, because of the bill-lag, the Wingiri fraudsters have hit many more clients, and continue to exacerbate the fraud exponentially.”

Telecom operators are facing this type of fraud for over a decade now, and this is only growing exponentially year on year around the globe.

Estimated fraud losses by method, in $USD billions [1]

The CFCA 2019 fraud loss survey reported that Wangiri had moved up into the top 5 fraud methods used by fraudsters – after subscription application fraud, it held joint position with payment fraud, PBX hacking, and IP PBX hacking. It is estimated that in 2019, the last date at which data is currently available, telecom operators lost close to US$ 1.82 billion globally to Wangiri fraud.

Case study: impact on one telecom operator group

“To put that another way,” says Yasser, “if we assume the CFCA survey is representative of all telecom operators, then if we consider a real case study for one of our large tier-one operator group customers with 2019 revenue of US$ 20 billion, this report suggests that they would have lost US$ 348 million to fraud, of which US$ 22.4 million would have been lost to Wangiri fraud. Additionally, by taking action against Wangiri, the cost of customer complaints will be reduced by 20%.”

“But these figures tell only part of the story – in addition to the costs associated with handling the customer call, identifying the calls, and processing the refund, a far greater impact for the operator is on reputation, brand value and customer trust, and many would argue the value of that far exceeds any US dollar figure.”

“At Digis Squared we are using our own expertise, tools and methodologies to help many of our customers to detect and prevent Wangiri fraud calls, globally,” said Yasser. “If we can help you with this, please get in touch.”

In conversation with Yasser ElSabrouty, Digis Squared Chief Business Officer and Co-Founder.

If you or your team would like to discover more about our capabilities, please get in touch: use this link or email sales@DigisSquared.com .

Digis Squared, independent telecoms expertise.

Sources,

  1. CFCA Fraud Loss Survey November 2019
  2. “Putting telecom fraud loss into perspective…”, a CFCA blog post by Luke Taylor
  3. UK OfCom ‘Wangiri’ missed call scams

Image credits

  • Digis Squared social media and blog banner image: Mufin Majnun

Digis-One ◦ Unified Fault Management for multi-vendor, multi-technology networks

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Why do telecom networks need a Unified Fault Management solution?

Digis-One is a Unified Fault Management (UFM) solution, delivering multi-vendor and multi-technology carrier-grade capability for telecom SOC (Service Operations Centres) and NOC (Network Operations Centres). But why is it needed?

Mobile networks today are a patchwork of systems, with solutions from multiple-vendors, becoming more complex as layers of IoT and 5G capability are added – the result of decades of commercial decisions, technology availability, and technical strategies. As the telecom sector is inherently defined by international standards, this mix-and-match approach should deliver a coherent system, but there are some critical elements which struggle to work together.

Network Operations Centre (NOC) engineers need to undertake fault and performance management activities, in addition to routine, repetitive tasks: fault detection, events enrichment, impact analysis and trouble ticketing creation – and all of this is undertaken manually.

A smart Unified Fault Management solution (UFM) is crucial to unify and automate all fault management activities.

Finding and resolving sub-optimal performance issues is often more complex than fault resolution. Improving performance in one system may create a knock-on consequence to another, which may not appear immediately, and may slowly creep before it triggers an alarm. When NOC teams have to log in to multiple, discrete NMS to view each component, it is impossible for them to assess the full picture.

“AI, 5G and automation are the key technologies driving digital transformation”

Source: EY (1)

Digis-One – UFM

A multi-vendor and multi-technology carrier-grade solution, used by Service or Network Operations Centers (SOC/NOC), focusing on fault management unification across all network and IT nodes.

The Digis Squared team have combined their knowledge of network failure occurrence mechanisms and resolution procedures, and our AI and automation skills, to develop Digis-One – a single consistent interface into all the Network and IT nodes in your network, with intelligent troubleshooting and optimisation.

“Digis-One intelligently assesses the data from all the Network and IT nodes it’s connected to. Using automated rules, root cause is identified against a library of recommended actions and troubleshooting steps, thereby overcoming native compatibility issues.”

Yasser ElSabrouty, Co-Founder, and Director of Sales & Business Development ME & Africa

See the full picture

Digis-One delivers,

  • One platform: rich, intuitive web interface, with a fully customisable single view.
  • Technology: all system components are Cloud Native Computing Foundation certified with a mesh of micro-services components.
  • Agility: setup can be changed on the fly, no loss of service with its static predefined load balancing rules.
  • Automation: fully-fledged library of “Generic / Vendor-specific” correlation and automation rules, network alarms, plus their recommended actions, and all troubleshooting steps pre-loaded. RPA ensures faults are consistently identified and swiftly resolved, minimising failure recovery time. Additionally, stable services outside standard working hours can be achieved by automating network operations and monitoring.
  • Cost efficiency: efficient system architecture and a single interface = simplified operations, administration and maintenance.  Efficiency also increases customer satisfaction due to prompt network failure response, which in turn helps retain customers and improve brand image.

Additional Digis-One benefits include,

  • Rapid integration, and elastic scalability: as components continue to be added to your network, the additional NMS they come with can be easily integrated into Digis-One.
  • Alarm grouping and pivoting
  • AutoPilot: the first step towards zero-touch operation
  • Commercially deployed: now.

Ensuring your network works

As mobile networks are enhanced with IoT, edge-computing and 5G, the ever-increasing complexity of fault management, demands that AI and automation are used to swiftly help your teams identify and resolve faults, and optimise network performance. Now more than ever, ensure your network works.

Digis Squared, independent telecoms expertise.

This blog post is also available as a stand-alone white paper.

To discuss how Digis-One can help your business, please use this link or email sales@DigisSquared.com to arrange a convenient time for an informal conversation.

Keep up to speed with company updates, product launches and our quarterly newsletter, sign up here.

Sources,

  1. EY: In the next wave of telecoms, are bold decisions your safest bet?

Abbreviations

  • CSP: Communications Service Providers
  • IoT: Internet of Things
  • NOC: Network Operations Centre
  • NMS: Network Management System
  • SOC: Service Operations Centre
  • UFM: Unified Fault Management

Image credits: Nathan Bang (patchwork), Jackson David (telecoms tower)

LTE 600MHz ◦ Network benchmarking & optimisation with INOS

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The background: why is the 600MHz band being used for LTE?

Mobile data usage continues to grow throughout the world, and the pandemic has massively impacted forecasts and expectations, causing telecom operators and CSPs to bring forward their deployment decisions.

“The limited amount of spectrum available below 1 GHz will ultimately run out of capacity. This puts mobile broadband at risk in emerging markets, rural areas and inside buildings. Therefore, long-term
planning is key to enable countries to offer great mobile services for everyone.”

GSMA, October 2019

So what can be done to identify more spectrum for mobile broadband? Countries working on the digital TV switchover can consider including 600MHz for mobile broadband. North America is leading the way – USA auctions were completed in April 2017, Canada in April 2019, and Mexico in 2020!

GSMA [1]

600MHz LTE benefits

We asked Amr Ashraf, RAN and Software Solution Architect and Trainer at Digis Squared, to give us his insights into LTE 600MHz band.

“Over the last couple of years we’ve been starting to hear about the deployment of very low band for mobile communication.  Now, we have commercial networks working on one of the most important low bands, 600MHz.”

Halberd Bastion [2]: Band 71 600 MHz LTE coverage prediction

“600MHz is likely to need about 0.8 cells to cover the same area as a 700MHz cell. So 600MHz will be excellent for providing coverage over a given area. And, as an added bonus, the 600MHz signal is likely to penetrate most buildings – great for indoor coverage.”

“Ideally, an operator will have a selection of low band (600MHz, 700MHz and 90MHz) spectrum to provide wide coverage and in-building coverage together with higher bands (1.8GHz, 2.1/2.6GHz, etc.) to provide capacity at specific locations with small cells, including in-building distributed antenna systems. The trick is in deploying the bands efficiently and economically to meet the market needs.”

… and issues

“On other hand, I don’t think that the 600MHz band will be that useful for 5G implementation, as we can’t use all the new transmission techniques with a low band like Massive MIMO.”

“In order for MIMO to work effectively, the antennas need to be spatially separated such that they are uncorrelated. And, the lower the band, the larger the antenna and the required separation between them. At the 600MHz band, it would be incredibly difficult to physically fit more than two uncorrelated antennas inside handsets, given their current sizing. Our calculations therefore assume that 5G and 4G in the 600MHz band will only make use of 2×2 MIMO.”

“There will be some problems to be faced in the reallocation of systems currently utilising this band, like DTV, and also some wireless devices like MICs. However, 600MHz LTE will be one of the most important bands during the next 10 years for full 4G coverage, particularly for rural areas.”

What problems are encountered deploying the 600MHZ band?

With any new network deployment, testing and optimisation are vital to ensure network performance, and also address any inadvertent impacts on existing networks. Whilst a limited number of activities can be undertaken centrally, drive testing, and in-building testing are critical to understanding the real customer experience in the field.

Developed in-house by Digis Squared, INOS is an intelligent, automated testing, benchmarking and analysis platform for network operators and service providers, delivering drive testing (DT), in-building solution (IBS) capability, and much more, whilst decreasing both the time taken to complete the work and opex cost.

Using cloud-controlled mobiles mounted in cars or taken around buildings, INOS collects and uploads data to the cloud, and eliminates the need for a laptop or engineers in the car, or out and about inside buildings. INOS can receive updated test scripts in the field to instantly re-analyse live network configuration changes, avoiding expensive follow-up field trips. It minimises the sometimes chaotic nature of drive tests, and ensures your staff can work alone at Covid-19 safe distances.

One of the key issues with any drive testing tool, such as INOS, is that there are very few mobile phones available for drive testing in this 600MHz LTE frequency, and where there are, drive test solutions don’t use them.

The good news: uniquely, INOS supports LTE 600MHz band

The Digis Squared team have extensively tested a large range of mobile phones, and the best-performing mobile in the LTE 600MHz band that we have found so far is the Google Pixel 5.

After detailed testing in specific locations where 600MHz LTE is in the live network, our teams have found a significant enhancement in capability using this device in our testing portfolio.

Digis Squared’s INOS tool assessing LTE 600MHz band: Coverage (RSRP)
Digis Squared’s INOS tool assessing LTE 600MHz band: Quality (SINR)
Digis Squared’s INOS tool assessing LTE 600MHz band: MIMO performance (spatial rank)
Digis Squared’s INOS tool assessing LTE 600MHz band: Internet speed (DL PDCP throughput)

LTE 600MHz optimisation with INOS

We’ve already started drive testing this capability with live networks. If you or your team would like to discover more about LTE 600MHz optimisation, or how INOS can help you in your network deployment or benchmarking, please get in touch: use this link or email sales@DigisSquared.com to arrange an informal chat.

In conversation with Amr Ashraf, Digis Squared 5G & LTE RAN & Software Solution Architect, and Trainer.

Digis Squared, independent telecoms expertise.

Keep up to speed with company updates, product launches and our quarterly newsletter, sign up here.

Sources

  1. GSMA
  2. Halberd Bastion
  3. For more information about INOS, click here.

Abbreviations

  • CSP: communications service provider
  • DT: drive testing
  • DTV: digital TV
  • IBS: in-building solution
  • INOS: Intelligent Network Optimisation Solution, a Digis Squared tool
  • MICs: wireless microphones
  • MIMO: multiple-input and multiple-output. A method for multiplying the capacity of a radio link using multiple transmission and receiving antennas to exploit multipath propagation.

Image credit: Gurwinder Singh

INOS 5G ◦ Now more than ever, test and optimise your 5G network

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INOS ◦ now with 5G & multi-vendor chipset support

Enhanced 5G benchmarking and testing capability, OpenRAN functionality testing, and multi-vendor 5G chipset support, the latest major new features added to INOS ensure clients have access to valuable commercial capability.

INOS – the independent telecoms network benchmarking, drive-test and in-building solution developed in-house at Digis Squared – has just been enhanced to deliver major new features to our telecom operator, CSP* and Regulatory clients, including those managing Private Networks. These new features deliver significant new capability to uncover and resolve even more telecom network issues, and enhance customer QoE and network QoS.

“The new 5G INOS features announced today will help MNOs better understand and optimise their network performance, including in deployments with complex multi-vendor architectures and OpenRAN. This is great news for our clients needing Covid-19 safe solutions to optimise their 5G infrastructure, for Regulators working to obtain an independent view of total network performance, and ultimately to the end customer seeking a better connection.”

AbdulRahman Fady, Digis Squared CTO

New 5G capability

  • Extending the range of network testing capabilities, the new enhancements add 5G to our 2G, 3G, 4G and IoT (CAT-M, NB-IoT 1, NB-IoT 2) network capability, across voice, video, data and OTT
  • The new INOS 5G complete testing set gives you visibility of more than two hundred different network KPIs
  • 5G benchmarking solution gives you full visibility of network QoS and customer QoE
  • 5G L3, L2 and L1 signalling capability
  • 5G fully automated single site verification drive testing solution
  • 5G indoor (in-building survey) testing capability.

Extended handset support

  • Now supporting multi-vendor 5G chipsets: Huawei, Samsung and Qualcomm flagship mobiles.

O-RAN support

  • OpenRAN functionality testing, end to end, from radio through to interoperability and benchmark testing between OpenRAN and Legacy RAN
  • Ensures you can pin-point which component in your multi-vendor ecosystem needs to be optimised or investigated further.

Cloud control – for instant updates, and Covid-19 safety

  • Our cloud-controlled INOS automated testing platform delivers both drive testing, and in building survey data, enabling operators and service providers to efficiently obtain the insights needed for key decisions.
  • Our tools need just one person in the vehicle or building – no engineers are needed on-site, ensuring that they can do their work safely and together we can keep our communities connected.
  • Detailed, actionable automated reports are generated within just 15 minutes after tests are completed.
  • Additionally, our real-time-view ensures you can immediately take action to address performance issues, and optimise your capability whilst engineers are still in the field. Make adjustments, OTA update test parameters and re-run your analysis swiftly.

Independent telecoms network analysis and benchmarking just got smarter.

Know your strengths, and weaknesses, across all network technologies. Now more than ever, ensure you know the capability, performance, quality of experience and coverage of your voice and data networks, and that of your competitors, so that you can optimise your assets efficiently. Discover more about how INOS can help you, here.

Now more than ever, test and optimise your 5G network.

To discuss how our independent tools and vendor-agnostic expertise can help your business, please use this link or email sales@DigisSquared.com to arrange an informal chat.

Keep up to speed with company updates, product launches and our quarterly newsletter, sign up here.

Digis Squared, independent telecoms expertise.

Abbreviations

  • CSP: Communications Service Providers
  • INOS: Intelligent Network Optimisation Solution, one of Digis Squared’s AI-led automated tools.
  • MNO: Mobile Network Operator
  • OpenRAN: via standardised radio interfaces and interoperability, hardware and software components from multiple vendors operate over network interfaces that are “open and interoperable”
  • QoE: Quality of Experience
  • QoS: Quality of Service

Image credit: Tim Trad

Regulators ◦ Now more than ever, use independent tools and expertise

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Is this the perfect storm of telecoms technical complexity?

As network deployments get more complex, capacity management more difficult to predict, and customer demands rise, how can Telecoms Regulators help deliver the best customer experience?

Globally, 5G deployments are picking up pace, and 2G and 3G networks starting to be retired – engineers at MNOs and CSPs* are knee-deep in complexity, managing technology sunset strategies, IoT connectivity migrations, and adding new layers of 5G components into the patchwork of systems from multiple vendors. This activity brings with it more new operational systems and alarms to integrate (and disentangle), and extra work to try to bring everything together into a cohesive system.

On top of that, the operational teams within MNOs and CSPs have been working hard this year to reconfigure networks to handle shifts in demand, as the pandemic forces huge numbers of people to suddenly work and study from home, and unpredictable demand patterns are addressed as best as possible.

Is this the perfect storm of telecoms technical complexity? How should Telecoms Regulators respond and ensure customer Quality of Experience and Quality of Service are maintained? With so many technical changes occurring in a short space of time, how can technical regulatory staff keep pace with technology, anticipate the future, and ensure their knowledge-base remains unbiased?

Digis Squared has over 50 industry experts with 10 or more years’ multinational mobile operator and vendor experience.

Use our expertise to work alongside your teams and augment their skills and capability,

  • Independent tools for QoE & QoS network benchmarking
  • Band & spectrum strategy consultation
  • Competence development to keep pace with new technologies.

“The Digis Squared team has a depth of experience and knowledge of implementations that you only acquire through years of working on difficult projects and tricky technology deployments. The team bring these insights to all their work, whether that’s with MNOs, CSPs or Regulators.“

Mohamed Hamdy, Digis Squared CCO

Independent tools for QoE & QoS network benchmarking

Regulatory coverage and performance concerns vary by market, but in general fall into 3 distinct areas,

  1. Many telecom network licenses have requirements to achieve specific KPIs: Geographical coverage, data throughput rates, QoS requirements.
  2. Legacy benchmarking solutions are often expensive, no longer supported by the vendor, and have a long and slow process to deliver the final report.
  3. When the report is eventually available, it is often a readout of dry statistics, with no clear recommendations on improvements. And with multiple solutions from multiple vendors implemented across the MNOs and CSPs in your territory, there is no standard process to rank and compare network operators.

Since the inception of Digis Squared the leadership team decided to invest and develop its own in-house, vendor-agnostic, multi-technology and scalable automated solutions, to ensure its staff and clients have access to vendor-independent assessment and testing of networks. Today, we are able to provide our clients with these tools to ensure they have an independent assessment of network capabilities. MNOs use our tools to help them accelerate network upgrades and network transformation, ensuring they are able to manage their network traffic growth and network complexity efficiently. Regulators use our tools to ensure they have the insights they need to assess KPIs independently.

INOS is the AI-led QoS and QoE benchmarking tool developed in-house at Digis Squared, using no network vendor tools.

  • Automated and efficient solution for fast and accurate reporting
  • Analysis and recommendations on improvements
  • Cross-check performance against the license to help regulators identify the gaps
  • Proven in the field with MNOs and Regulators
  • Interacts with all major vendors’ platforms, including Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia
  • Covid19 safe solution: our tools need just one person in the vehicle or building – no engineers are needed on-site, ensuring that they can do their work safely and together we can keep our communities connected.

When used by Telecoms Regulators, INOS delivers,

  • One independent, vendor and network agnostic solution
  • Fully automated reports, just 15 minutes after tests end
  • Failure insights: empowered by automation and analytics, we can deliver detailed insights into failure reason
  • INOS BM score – rank and benchmark all operators, by all services tested, across all network technologies and vendors
  • Independent and transparent scrutiny: Operators can access INOS platform, with limited and agreed privileges to review their log files and reports.

INOS KPIs include, but are not limited to,

  • Coverage & quality radio conditions
  • Field KPIs: CST, CSSR, HOSR, CDR
  • Throughput DL & UL: FTP, HTTP, HTTPs
  • Voice quality: POLQA
  • Video Quality: PEVQs
  • OTTs KPIs
  • Adopted optimisation strategy
  • Overlapping and needed neighbours’ optimisation
  • UE Happy Index

Get in touch to talk with us informally about how we can help your Regulatory teams with independent tools and expertise for network benchmarking, and discover INOS here.

Band & spectrum strategy consultation

The Digis Squared team have decades of experience working in telecoms operators and telecom equipment providers, with huge experience across many countries, implementations, technology deployments, and vendor solutions. We can work alongside your teams, or independently, to share our insights and assess innovative and commercial uses of your spectrum, to ensure optimum utilisation in your market.

  • Assess the utilisation of all existing bands
  • Evaluate service usage and importance with stakeholders
  • Policy & procedure updates
  • Spectrum audit and redeployment strategies: identify, complement, and refine all data on national spectrum use
  • Future policy: balancing the needs of end-users and spectrum-users are met to encourage investment
  • Emerging technologies: implementation scenarios and spectrum allocation recommendations for 5G, WLAN, LPWA and more.

Competence development & training

We recognise the difficulties in identifying the vendor-independent training necessary to ensure your teams are not unconsciously biased towards specific solutions.

Our team of experienced staff are well placed to deliver a broad range of technical and non-technical training.

Our approach for competence development utilises different methods to best suit the client, their culture and team needs, with an emphasis on on-job training as well as classroom training, delivered as active, participatory workshops and webinars by our technology experts. We can deliver training on-site, remotely via video link, or in your own time via online material.

Get in touch to arrange a no-obligation discussion with our team, or request a copy of our Technical Training Catalogue: sales@DigisSquared.com

“In my view, it’s more important than ever that Telecoms Regulators use independent expertise and tools in their assessments, to ensure they have a complete view of their ecosystem, and prepare for whatever storms are on the horizon.”

Mohamed Hamdy, Digis Squared CCO

Now more than ever, use independent tools and expertise in regulatory assessments.

To discuss how our independent tools and vendor-agnostic expertise can help your Regulatory Teams, please use this link or email sales@DigisSquared.com to arrange a video call.

Keep up to speed with company updates, product launches and our quarterly newsletter, sign up here.

Digis Squared, independent telecoms expertise.

Abbreviations

  • CSP: Communications Service Providers
  • INOS: Intelligent Network Optimisation Solution, one of Digis Squared’s AI-led automated tools.
  • MNO: Mobile Network Operator
  • QoE: Quality of Experience
  • QoS: Quality of Service

Image credit: Michael D.

INOS ◦ Now more than ever, know your network strengths, and weaknesses

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Understand what has changed, then invest

As work patterns continue to change, operators struggle to model their network capacity and investment plans. Understanding current network coverage, performance and quality of experience, and that of competitors, is vital before investment decisions are made.

Our cloud-controlled INOS automated testing platform delivers both drive testing, and in building data, enabling operators and service providers to efficiently obtain the insights needed for key upgrade decisions. [Our tools need just one person in the vehicle or building – no engineers are needed on-site, ensuring that they can do their work safely and together we can keep our communities connected.]

Know your strengths, and weaknesses. Now more than ever, ensure you know the capability, performance, quality of experience and coverage of your voice and data networks, and that of your competitors, before you invest. Discover more about how INOS can help you, here.

Now more than ever, use INOS to benchmark coverage, performance & QoE.

To discuss how our network benchmarking expertise can help your business, please use this link or email sales@DigisSquared.com to arrange a convenient time for an informal conversation.

Keep up to speed with company updates, product launches and our quarterly newsletter, sign up here.

Digis Squared, independent telecoms expertise.

Image credit: Klavs Taimins

RPA ◦ Now more than ever, automate to manage rapidly changing demands

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Organizations around the globe are turning to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to become faster and more agile in the face of increased demand and rapidly changing environments.

From managing the high changes in network traffic, supporting the increased demand in customer call centers, to preparing and enabling a remote workforce, organizations are realizing the benefits of automating right now.

“RPA: one of the 7 biggest technology trends that will transform telecoms in 2020”

Source: Forbes (1)

What is RPA?

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a type of software productivity tool that enables users to configure bots, which manage specific dedicated tasks within software applications – no actual physical robots are involved!

The bots can be programmed to mimic key strokes enabling actions to be concatenated, delivering complex macro-like functionality. They can work across multiple systems in a session (different applications, spreadsheets on different operating systems and so on), for example, extracting data from one system, merging it with another data set, and then importing it into a different application.

Working together, bots can handle complex and sophisticated processes, not just removing the risk of human error, but driving down costs and speeding up time taken to complete tasks.

“To increase business agility, IT leaders need to maximize the breadth of RPA use cases and stay ahead of market trends.”

Source: Gartner  (2)

RPA in businesses today

Today, RPA is being used across businesses to optimise repetitive and time-consuming tasks, and eliminate errors.

RPA can speed up analysis of demand fluctuations and sales intelligence, streamline revenue assurance, accelerate order activations and assist with call centre queries.

There remain many opportunities to introduce it in more departments, and use it more widely across functions.

Boost your automation level

The “new normal” has created massive changes in demand, as both home-working and communications between friends and family impact the networks. We can help your teams adapt their network strategies, adjust operational support, and implement new technologies to support the changes we see now, and those we can anticipate as the situation continues to change.

Digis Squared can provide remote resources to automate many of your processes, and facilitate your teams’ working-from-home tasks. The Digis Squared team have extensive experience of implementing and optimizing RPA.

“Process automation will define the telco of the future”

Source: EY (4)

We can help your teams to,

  • Design and implement RPA solutions and methodologies to automate any repetitive process
  • Review and optimize existing RPA processes and infra-structure, and identify additional opportunities
  • Processes assessment reflecting the business value of any implemented automation
  • Complete optimization on UiPath license utilization

We can also help you identify and target potential areas of improvement,

  • Creating base level of RPA awareness
  • Deep dive with all teams to identify business challenges
  • Propose new ideas of automation
  • Posting RPA-related updates
  • Monitoring and analytics of all automated processes

Using project-proven methodologies, and RPA process-driven workflow, together with your team we work to understand and discover your issues, identify efficiencies, design solutions and then develop and implement automated solutions. But that is only part of the process, ongoing assessment of the implementation to identify further enhancements and optimisations is a key part of the work we do.

Off the peg, and bespoke RPA solutions

We have more than 50 ready-to-use RPA process developments, varying between complex, medium and simple scope,

  • Site halt and activation
  • Down sites repetition handling
  • Network fluctuations monitoring and reporting
  • Alarm monitoring and reporting
  • Services testing
  • Outages handling
  • Configuration management execution
  • Configurations audit
  • Trouble Tickets handling
  • Customer complaints handling
  • Special events monitoring
  • International traffic optimisation
  • Warehouse management
  • Inventory management
  • Field expenses monitoring
  • Disaster recovery audits
  • Consistency checks
  • Data synchronisation and integrity
  • Licenses renewal handling
  • Network elements backup system
  • OSS/BSS accounts management
  • Managed services KPIs monitoring
  • Operations KPIs monitoring and reporting

Our teams have the skill to precisely address your business demands: we can adapt these ready-to-use RPA developments to rapidly meet your needs, or create a bespoke solution from scratch.

Now more than ever, RPA can increase your agility to manage rapidly changing demands.

To discuss how our RPA expertise can help your business, please use this link or email sales@DigisSquared.com to arrange a convenient time for an informal conversation.

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“By 2024, organizations will lower operational costs by 30% by combining hyperautomation technologies with redesigned operational processes.”

Source: Gartner Predicts 2020 (2)

Sources,

  1. Forbes
  2. Gartner Predicts 2020
  3. Gartner 2019 State of RPA Survey study
  4. EY (original article, no longer available), Digital transformation for 2020 and beyond, a global telecommunications study

Image credit: Philipp Katzenberger