Through the Looking Glass

In business they call it visibility. To Einstein it was a matter of the time/space continuum. H.G. Wells immortalized it in “The Time Machine.” In TV land, someone called it “Quantum Leap.”

Actix's Des Owens simply calls it an appreciation. It's the ability to go back in time to set a new course for the future.

Owens is president of North American operations for one of the U.K.'s fastest growing companies. He came to the U.S. in a time machine (more likely a Boeing), which in 1995 transported him to Virginia. It was there he developed his appreciation not only for raising British children with southern drawls, but also for an opportunity based on the realization that “at least in terms of maturity, the U.S. wireless market was running a couple of years behind Europe.”

The opportunity was in using the experience gained in Europe to get out in front of the performance requirements of North American operators. Owens had seen it all before — the need for tools to help fledgling wireless operators measure and engineer for optimum performance. He was the director of network engineering at Comsearch, a wireless consulting firm and was a vice president for Grayson Wireless, where he did product management and marketing. He also spent four years at BT Research Laboratories, followed by early development work in GSM and DCS-1800 networks with Cellnet and One2One (since rebranded as T-Mobile).

So anticipating what was ahead for North American operators, Owens helped introduce Actix's version of performance management to the U.S.

Actix's specialty over the last 10 years has been providing solutions that help operators understand their air interfaces, and how their performance affects voice quality and networks overall. Today, the company is looking at data, which, to paraphrase his fictional, time-traveling countryman Austin Powers, Owens said, “can help the industry get its mojo back.”

But not if it sucks. “You don't want your new data customers going to bandwidthbusters.com every time they fire up their laptop and see they are getting the equivalent of 22K rather than the 50K or 60K they were promised,” said Ken Hyers, wireless analyst at In-Stat/MDR.

Slow data transfer speed is bothersome and probably inhibits growth in the wireless data market. But in a live network with actual services, it is merely a symptom of other network performance problems. With voice there is a very strong correlation between network connectivity and quality of service, Owens said. With data, there is no correlation — at least not at the connectivity layer. That's where Actix's new data products dig deeper.

“Whether or not a few packets get lost or slowed down only really has meaning if it is understood in the context of the service it was a part of,” Owens said.

In order to understand that relationship, Actix's performance tools analyze the data and transactions flowing between the base station controller and the packet gateway. Actix's software — and it's all software — is able to break open the packets and determine the relationship between the data, the device and service with which it is associated.

“We don't work off of peg counters anymore. Times have changed from when a couple of connection alarms would give you a meaningful measure of the network,” Owens said.

Because drive testing falls short of real-time, service-related analysis and proprietary network element log files have limitations in multi-vendor environments, and protocol analyzer drill bits go only so far into the protocol stack for small blocks of time, Actix's data analysis approach seems to be winning operators over.

Nextel became Actix's 100th customer this summer, and the company recently sold its new data engine to the “largest domestic provider of wireless data in the U.S.,” Owens said. Its U.S. customer list includes Alltel, AT&T Wireless, Cingular, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless.

That, Owens said, is its strength. Actix software works for all wireless technologies. It supports GSM-900/DCS-1800/PCS-1900, CDMA (IS-95, J-STD-8), IS-136, AMPS, GPRS and iDEN. “It seems a little odd that we were able to succeed on the back of CDMA because we got our experience in GSM,” he said.

Another of the company's strengths is in how the data Actix collects and correlates is ultimately applied, In-Stat's Hyers said. “Operators have traditionally had a hard time tracking individual usage down to the level of detail Actix is providing, so that's pretty important. But the real benefit to operators is the efficiency it provides in engineering.”

Even without the current capital crunch, wireless operators bitten by the promises of wireless data in the past are extra cautious about dumping too much money into delivering data when demand is still questionable. “It's a question of how to deliver what you already have more efficiently so you don't have to spend capex unnecessarily by overbuilding the network,” Hyers said.

Actix data analysis tools use performance data to give operators better insight for network planning, infrastructure validation, performance metrics and network optimization of their packet data networks.

The trend of having access to more information is unstoppable, Owens said, but we're not going to be streaming video any time soon. “People got carried away with that idea. What are the day-to-day activities that you or I do that will require us to be traveling and at the same time doing streaming video? The two are incongruous,” he said. “It's not a reflection of how people actually live their lives.”

Actix's software could help operators provide business users with a level of service they've come to expect, particularly in key locations such as airports. “Things change dramatically when a raft of data services are running on a packet network over a wireless connection. We believe that because of that change, operators will need to offer [business] customers more information on how services operate on different devices,” Owens said. The data Actix software collects from the network can provide it.

Today, however, data traffic volume is still not much to brag about. But if Owens got back into his time machine and jumped ahead a few years, he expects he would see more business applications for wireless data. But so far, he said, marketing for wireless data has missed the boat — or Boeing.

“Marketing seems to be focused on the teen market and making gadgets cool rather than looking at the demographic out there of business users, who are the ones willing to pay the most money,” he said.