Network planning and beyond MSI seeks expanded role in optimization and operation >BY JASON MEYERS, Wireless Networks Editor

Any software company that pigeonholes itself as a network planner or systems integrator risks rendering itself obsolete.

To combat that, Mobile Systems International is developing products that will help it branch out into other ongoing stages of wireless network operation.

At the base of that strategy is Planet, the company's flagship software engineering tool that dozens of worldwide wireless network operators and most major infrastructure developers use.

"One of the greatest things about competition is that most major manufacturers use our software," said Mohammed Sheikh, group marketing director at MSI, London. "We are constantly under pressure to ensure that they are able to cope with the design needs." Most wireless networks are poorly designed because carriers rush to market, underestimate demand and put capacity in the wrong places, Sheikh said. A unified software system can help carriers steer clear of those problems from the beginning, he said.

One of MSI's biggest challenges is to ensure that everything fits with other systems that its customers are using.

"We're gradually building our suite of products and services so we can move into the optimization phase and into later phases of operation," said Colin Robinson, president of MSI's U.S. operations. "More and more, we're seeing requirements to integrate our products with others that carriers have deployed. We are flexible.

"Customer satisfaction is our focus," Robinson said. "Everyone says that, but in a market like this you really have to mean it.

During the GSM World Congress last month, the company launched a new version of Planet and announced the commercial release of its software fleet's newest member, Maptool. Maptool allows users to manipulate and present geographical data, and it can operate alone or in conjunction with Planet.

MSI also recently took a 60% stake in IDS, a Swedish software company that specializes in data warehousing solutions and management information systems provisioning. "Our acquisition will help us create new software for data management," Sheikh said.

MSI has offices in London, Paris, Stockholm, Singapore, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago and Sao Paulo, Brazil, and will soon open facilities in Hong Kong and New Delhi, India. The company employs more than 440 people, about 200 of whom work in the U.S.

Having an international presence means adapting to different environments and making products flexible to handle all shapes and sizes of networks, Sheikh said. For example, the company has a contract with Digital Phone Co. in Thailand, a country with a population of 60 million people-10 million of whom live in Bangkok. In addition to the city's concentrated population, Bangkok's highway and building construction and floating market areas made it one of the most complex cities to design around, Sheikh said.

In the U.S., Sprint PCS is using MSI's Planet product for propagation modeling in several markets.

"We use it for the initial design, then go out and collect signal data, bring it back to the model and make it more accurate," said Emily Adams, RF design engineering manager for Sprint's Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Okla.; Little Rock, Ark.; and Memphis markets. "As you grow a system and things change, you want to modify the model.

Adams pointed to the system's two-way flexibility as an advantage. "It seems a lot more powerful than other modeling software I've dealt with," she said. "Being able to input real data rather than just leave it at the theoretical level makes it more useful and allows us to use it through the design process, into optimization and beyond."

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