Central Intelligence

The post-roll-out after- glow: The marketing campaign was a roaring success, with thousands of new subscribers, many siphoned from competitors. The free bundle of enhanced services was a great hook, and minutes of use are exceeding your wildest expectations. Maybe exceeding them too much. Customer service is fielding complaints left and right about dropped and blocked calls. What went wrong?

Ensuring high-quality service starts at the design stage with educated guesses about what services users will want and where they'll want them. PCS' rapid penetration nationwide and its diverse demographics make design more challenging than when networks had to accommodate primarily business users in metropolitan areas. Today, putting the right capacity in the right places means first deciding, for example, what demographics an enhanced service might attract and where those users work and play. That challenge only will grow.

"If we're saying we're a replacement for landline service, then you have to make some assumptions that the amount of time people are going to be on the phone and the number of calls they're going to make are going to be significantly more than cellular service," said Keith Paglusch, Sprint PCS senior vice president of technology services and network operations.

Ensuring high-quality service means pulling data from a wide variety of sources. A carrier that's the veteran of dozens of build-outs or a spin-off of a landline carrier has amassed data that can be applied to a build-out in a similar-size market. Both start-up and established carriers also can tap state and federal transportation agencies, which compile data ranging from how many vehicles travel a section of highway to what roads are slated for construction or expansion.

"If you look at what DOT's predictions are, you'll be in much better shape for the future," said John Sleet, WaveLink Systems director of consulting services. "Most of the (wireless) traffic is still on the primaryand secondary roads."

Marketing projections also are key to ensuring that the right capacity is in the right places. Adding data from regional economic-development agencies, which project residential and business growth, also helps avoid costly headaches such as cell splitting.

"When you're going through your zoning and site-selection processes, you can't focus just on getting sites," Sleet said. "You need to make sure they fit into your long-term plan. Otherwise, it's going to be very costly."

If adding data services is part of that long-term plan, the additional time and capital spent designing a network that can accommodate cell splitting easily will pay off in the long run.

"The most important thing is not to underestimate the importance of the original design," Paglusch said. "What people tend to do is want to save money in the beginning."

That tendency is common in start-ups, which often are headed by people with little telecommunications experience or venture capitalists who want to see an immediate return on their money. But ultimately it comes down to pay now or pay later.

"Good up-front planning costs more but saves big bucks in the long run," said Marc Rolfes, Communication Consulting Services vice president of business development.

Those savings can come in the form of less capital spent attracting subscribers to replace those lost due to blocked and dropped calls.

"If you spend a little extra time making sure your design not only takes care of launch day but also out a year, you're better off," Paglusch said. "You don't want to give someone a negative impression of your network while you're still trying to tweak it."

Information Overload Subscribers aren't the only ones who benefit from digital. One common estimate is that carriers can collect 100 times more information from digital networks than they can from analog networks.

"I can pull more data out of the network than people would have time to read," Paglusch said. "I know how long our average talk time is. I know different things about dropped calls, blocked calls, frame-error rate, noise floor ... ."

The list goes on and on. That embarrassment of riches can be a mixed blessing, however.

"The challenge is figuring out which data to pay attention to, and the other 90% you can throw away," Rolfes said.

Digital is maturing rapidly, and there's a steep learning curve for newcomers and a scarcity of experienced, qualified people. System-performance information isn't valuable if it only passes through the company as an indigestible lump. Therefore, carriers want information the average person can interpret, and network-management vendors are responding with graphical user interfaces. The result is that all departments, from marketing to engineering, can be forward-thinking from network design through build-out and operation. It's one thing to have network problems and hear about them. It's another to have problems and not hear about them.

"If there is a tool out there that will simulate customer usage or take actual customer usage and give a feel for the quality of the network, you're far better off if you can be pro-active in determining areas where you want to provide fill-in cell sites," Paglusch said.

Calling Patterns Pay Digital is about efficiency, so it's no surprise that vendors are using that philosophy to develop network-management packages that support real-time links between network operations and departments such as customer care and marketing. Ensuring high-quality service becomes a team effort when marketing can tell engineering which parts of the service area likely will have the heaviest use of a new enhanced service. At the same time, marketing and engineering can look for calling patterns that suggest where capacity needs to be increased or what enhanced services could take advantage of those patterns.

"Our marketing team uses information such as how long people spend on the phone and how many calls they make to target their programs," Paglusch said. "We sit down with our marketing counterparts on a regular basis to ask, 'Where do you expect the growth?'"

In the future, network management will pull data from even more databases. Today, carriers can compile termination data to verify administration billing ratios. Tomorrow, if the vision of multiple LECs comes true, carriers could use real-time links to rate tables to find the most cost-effective way to route calls.

Data warehousing takes network management a step farther by allowing each department to use the same database to answer different questions.

"What percent of my customers in area code XXX are using call waiting? The same underlying data can give them the answer to: What is the utilization of my call-waiting circuits?" said Fred Thompson, director of worldwide telecom at data-warehousing developer Informix. "I don't need to change the structure of the tools to get that answer. I simply need a different data set and a different query."

A template with the ability to customize queries means departments ranging from engineering to marketing can visit the warehouse to look for patterns and potential savings that otherwise might go unnoticed in hectic daily work flow. Who says knowledge isn't power?

System performance used to be synonymous with expeditions to cell sites, getting dirty and eating box lunches. But with increased network intelligence and the tools to plumb that data to new depths, it's getting easier to pull data from far-flung databases back to a central point with better working conditions. As sophisticated as network-management tools are, however, they can't replace experienced personnel.

"I think the carriers are a lot smarter about where they are planning for capacity, and that stems from cross-pollination of the work force," said Marc Rolfes, Communication Consulting Services vice president of business development. "The people who worked for cellular company A are now working for PCS company B, and they know where there's always lots of traffic."

Also knowing where the traffic is -- and will be -- comes from living in the market.

"We're local in the communities that we build in, so it's not being done from one location in the country," said Keith Paglusch, Sprint PCS senior vice president of technology services and network operations. "We have people who live and work in those communities. We spend a lot of time understanding what people in Minneapolis do vs. people in Kansas City. We try to understand what's appropriate for that marketplace."

But because personnel is one of the biggest chunks of overhead, it's tempting to look for cost savings there.

"From an engineering and technical perspective, the first line of defense in terms of good quality that customers expect is a talented system-performance group that has adequate staff and tools to carry out their job," Rolfes said. "If I were responsible for the technical operations at a carrier, I would put system performance way up as a priority for where resources should go."