LMDS Gets Down to Business

As networks become larger, ensuring quality is a greater challenge. Whether the choice is distributed or centralized management, the success of any network depends on good analytical equipment and monitoring systems. A qualified stable of network engineers and technicians then can identify internal network glitches and outages before subscribers even notice. In keeping with this behind-the-scenes mystique, many of today's automated test and monitoring systems allow trained staff to isolate sectors or analyze an entire network from a central location. It doesn't eliminate the need for field personnel, but some problems can be rectified through the network or at least be re-routed until a technician can reach the location.

The key with these systems is that they provide a pro-active solution for locating and testing voice-quality problems. Being pro-active allows better use of a technician's time -- fixing problems rather than locating them.

The trend in wireless is toward centralized network management, but carriers that offer this type of service often have to make some tough economic and personnel decisions. That usually leads to one thing -- fewer jobs through the consolidation of engineering and operations positions.

In January, for example, Sprint PCS consolidated its engineering and operations staffs into three main field offices -- Mahwah, NJ, San Francisco and Dallas -- following a rapid, yet extensive, build-out in more than 130 U.S. markets. Other jobs were moved to headquarters in Kansas City, but field-engineering teams remain in all markets, according to Tom Murphy, Sprint PCS director of public relations.

"They're there for situations that call for on-site work and for helping with the expansion of our network," said Murphy, who would not disclose the number of job cuts.

Sprint PCS closed out 1997 with 7,000 employees, but that figure should rise above 8,000 by year-end, Murphy said. Sprint PCS plans to add jobs in customer care, sales and marketing, all in an effort to assist additional market launches, including Chicago, Atlanta and Houston.

"These shifts we made in the field are what happens when you move from a building and launching phase into an operational phase and coverage expansion phase," Murphy said. "In the markets where we're already up, consolidation is natural. You don't need the same resources to maintain and operate a market as you did to build it and launch it."

Other carriers are moving in the same direction. On April 1, ALLTEL achieved connectivity from its wireline network-management center in Hudson, OH, to all its cellular switches. Now the center, which had been providing fault management, surveillance and technical support for the wireline operations, also is serving as a centralized network operations center for wireless.

"We're able to make the software modifications in that (wireline) system to accommodate the wireless business as well," said Frank Schueneman, ALLTEL vice president of network operations.

ALLTEL has been combining operations in many areas. The company is being managed now as a converged operation with wireless and wireline under one management, Schueneman said.

Customer care, however, is maintained at the market-area level. "With reorganization a year ago, we pushed a lot of the engineering and customer-oriented functions back out to the field where they belong," Schueneman said.

Multivendor Integration Doug Strombom, US West International Systems Group director of operations, North America and Asia, said carriers are being forced to evaluate traditional processes in order to remain progressive.

"I worry about the industry because there are so many people out there selling some sort of protocol or mediation, and I'm just never sure that these solutions really yield the business benefit that they're intended to," Strombom said. "What we're doing now is focusing on decision-support systems that bridge a network-management realm into the other concerns of the business."

Strombom referred to churn management and indicated that 25% to 30% of churn is because of poor-quality networks.

One-2-One, a carrier in the United Kingdom, uses US West's WatchMark network management system, which allows wireless network operators to integrate information across a multivendor enterprise. One-2-One runs a national network management center with 1,600 base stations and provides 95% of the country's coverage.

Strombom said the company had doubled the efficiency of its field staff, citing 33 base stations per field operations employee vs. a normal range of 15 to 20. The network-management center has taken the guesswork out of its operations, he said.

Reducing Headcount Comcast Cellular, whose market consists of Philadelphia, New Jersey and Wilmington, DE, launched its centralized network- management center in January 1997. Sam Chernak, vice president of operations and network engineering, said Comcast predicted substantial cost savings and ultimately trimmed its operations headcount by 25% when consolidating in Wayne, PA. There Comcast monitors 450 cell sites and four switching centers.

"We're building intelligence into the network-management center," Chernak said. "Engineers now respond to soft alarms, where usage is well below average, and it has freed them up from the more mundane work of pouring through systems data."

Many wireless operations "grew up via a series of acquisitions and mergers," Chernak said, "and a lot of them -- we being one of them -- had highly fractured operations, where each market did it its own way."

Comcast enlisted the platform services of Hewlett-Packard (HP) in the summer of 1996 and became the official U.S. reference site for HP's new management product, Remedy.

"It's done; it's successful; and in terms of people power, there have been huge cost savings," Chernak said. "I'd say it would be in the millions per year."

Vendors Expand Solutions Most of the industry's equipment vendors are either leading the way or adapting to a centralized environments for network management. Offerings run the gamut from mass-produced hardware and software to custom solutions. According to some vendors, many operators are investors who have not run wireless networks before, and they are looking for everything: customer care, billing, network management, frequency planning and site acquisition.

Nortel's philosophy is to have strong element managers, said Andrew Germano, senior manager for network management. With qualified switch-based and radio-based managers, he said, it allows the company to participate in multivendor networks.

"We need to provide solutions that might include non-Nortel equipment," he said.

Although Nortel, the majority provider for Sprint PCS, tends to focus on larger networks, including Omnipoint on the East Coast and Western Wireless on the West Coast, it will scale down to the "smaller guy" that has one switch and a couple of base-station controllers.

"Our philosophy is that the information really needs to be shared across organizations," Germano said. "Integration between customer care and network management is key so that everyone knows how the network is performing."

One of Nortel's strengths, Germano said, is a concept called Engineering Tools, which is used for outside services and in-house for frequency planning, performance management and monitoring, and off-line capacity tuning.

Germano, too, sees a major shift from distributed management to centralized.

"The ones with roots in AMPS are used to running a network with less management capability," he said. "And once they start out with a distributed philosophy, it's harder to make the move because it becomes an ownership issue with those regional directors that have to give up some control."

Nevertheless, Nortel manufactures products for the supporters of both philosophies.

"We have to support both," Germano added. "We're not going to try to cram a solution down their throat. We have an evolution path that is very smooth between the two."

Depth, Not Breadth Motorola's network-management products, on the other hand, are focused on managing Motorola networks, said Rebecca Sendel, senior marketing manager for network-management products. The company classifies its product as a "market manager," whereby Motorola would manage an entire area if its products were used exclusively.

"It's not part of our plan to manage Lucent's infrastructure," she said. "We focus on having depth of the product, rather than breadth. We go for the analytical type of (business), where you're providing intelligence to help the operator manage their system, rather than gathering alarms for the whole world."

Sendel said Motorola is increasing its focus on achieving the carriers' goals of centralization.

"They (carriers) want to have fewer people doing the management of the network," Sendel added, "and they want to pay them less. So they're trying to reduce their costs and have the system be more intelligent, rather than the operator."

MoM is Watching Chuck Smith, NEC manager of sales and marketing for the network-management division, agrees that many companies want to be able to have one network manager that will reflect everything that is happening in the system. "They used to call them MoMs, managers of managers," Smith said. "I think that's coming back into play, but they are calling them a network-management system."

Companies that have element-management systems are looking for systems that sit above these managers and give a total view, end to end, of what's happening across the entire network. Ideally, these systems will be able to work with equipment from different vendors.

"We're in the process of developing network management systems to address those needs," Smith said.

NEC is offering some network managers now, but they deal with NEC technology. For example, NEC will be introducing Management System 2202 soon, which is designed to work with NEC equipment. This platform includes NEC's 21GTX fault-management system that can deal with a variety of equipment, NEC and non-NEC. But Management System 2202 doesn't address non-NEC equipment, and it doesn't address the new intelligent network elements, Smith said.

One of the driving factors toward centralized network management is the fact that the computer is spreading to network elements, Smith said.

"The elements of days gone by were relatively dumb," he said. "Now you've got software in the network element that is sort of helping manage the element."

Smith used the example of a radio with a transmitter, multiplexer and receiver that are being controlled by local intelligence contained in agent software that sits out at the network element. The software is watching the various components of the radio. When it detects a problem with an element, it sends a message to an element-management system that's at a central site.

"So what you've got is distributed software," Smith said. "Because of that you've got each one of the manufacturers with its own element-management system. From a user perspective, you want to be able to look across those various technologies from a single console."

Another driver is Telecommunications Management Network (TMN). Formally defined in 1988 by the International Telecommunications Union, TMN consists of a set of interface recommendations or standards, typically illustrated as a pyramid.

"The United States has not paid much attention to TMN before, but it's becoming more and more of an issue," Smith said. "It's the way of the world. We're global, and we can't say we're not interested in what's happening on other continents."

Trials The LMDS auctions have been responsible for some recent wireless developments. MicroStar, BEL-Tronics and Akcess Pacific Group have formed a new systems integration company, Belstar Systems, to provide end-to-end solutions for the LMDS market. The company will construct a model commercial system using the 42,820-household and business LMCS (the Canadian equivalent of LMDS)regional operating license recently acquired by the Canadian subsidiary of MicroStar International.

Belstar also will pursue alliances with other LMDS equipment developers and market its solutions to potential operators in the United States and Canada as well as other countries.

WinStar has activated a full-duplex, ATM-based, PMP broadband, fixed trial network carrying voice, data and video services in Washington. The network incorporates two hub sites (soon to expand to three) and provides high-speed telecommunications services over multiple sectors to four end-user buildings. Traffic is being routed through an ATM over-the-air interface and integrated with WinStar's ATM metropolitan area backbone network and its Class 5 local switched network.

The network offers enhanced voice, data, video conferencing, LAN-to-LAN interconnections, file transfer, MPEG-2 video, distance learning, e-mail and high-speed Internet access. The network will provide multiple channels to each end-user building, and each channel will provide up to 155mb/s.