By Yosi Ben-Dov, Ph.D.

In the quest for service providers to minimize churn and maximize market share, service quality and customer relations are more important than ever.  As rival providers offer an increasing variety of services, traditional market roles and niches are beginning to overlap, producing a trend that clearly increases competitive pressures.  Along with this increased competition, subscribers increasingly demand high quality of service and are increasingly willing to switch providers after experiencing service degradation or network down-time.  Regardless of local market conditions, this is a trend  seen across the globe.  For example, in markets with high levels of saturation, such as North America and Western Europe, there is little opportunity left for expansion, making subscriber retention that much more important.  In markets like Brazil, Russia, India, and China, there is still room for growth, but a consumer tendency toward a prepaid model requires higher sensitivity to customer satisfaction.  Throughout the industry, market share is directly linked to service quality and network availability.  Particularly in the case of mobile service, this means providers must maintain a high level of network capacity, coverage, and quality.

In addition to pressures from reduced customer tolerance for inadequate service levels, the actual task of providing quality coverage for mobile service is becoming more complex.  The sheer scale of today's mobile networks makes usage patterns and bandwidth demands harder to predict.  Mobile traffic, both local and roaming, requires more flexibility from the network to ensure bandwidth availability.  The fact that the variety of services and content offered today often has higher bandwidth requirements than traditional services further complicates this issue.  Until now, network operators have had limited tools to deal with this aspect of customer satisfaction.  Industry specialists in CRM, OSS, and other fields have been addressing this challenge for quite some time.  Now, a new solution has been developed from the field of network optimization.

Radio Access Network (RAN) optimization solutions have always had an impact on service quality and therefore on customer satisfaction.  However, than influence was relatively indirect and difficult to measure until recently.  Optimization was based on data sources that did not measure actual users' experience, but rather on the limited geographical overview that could be generated by prediction-based planning tools and drive tests.  Traditionally, network engineering staff would traverse coverage areas with testing equipment to take independent readings of signal quality.  Then, the signal data from the narrow testing paths would be used to extrapolate quality to the entire coverage area.  This method of network optimization served to reduce a network's operating and capital expenses (OpEx and CapEx) by maximizing current resource utilization and helping to plan future infrastructure investments.  However, the results were often inaccurate, and the actual customer experience was assessed exclusively through CRM communication and thought to be outside the domain of network optimization.    If,  after  a  given optimization