Indian telecom operators have a very challenging market to sort through. There are a lot of customers in the urban cities, but the telcos have a very limited spectrum to serve them with. This creates network capacity issues, and things such as video buffering and call drops keeps on happening. Jugad Bawa, Director, Sales for South Asia and the Middle East, Teoco India, in an exclusive interaction with TelecomTalk, said that telecom operators are using geoanalytics to improve the network experience for their customers.
How Can Telcos Leverage Geoanalytics to Improve Network Performance?
"Previously, what used to happen was that the operator used to see the performance of the network at a cell level. So what would happen is, a cell, for example, was catered to, say 1 lakh calls a day. So if the KPI of that particular cell would say that 99% of the calls went through, this would mean that there were still 1000 calls that didn't go through. A thousand calls are a lot of calls not to go through. From a statistical point of view, a 99% success rate looks good, but at a micro level, a thousand calls not going through means 1000 users having a frustrating day. That is where geolocation and geoanalytics come into play," said Bawa.
"With geolocation and geoanalytics, what happens is that each event on the network is captured, which is the call trace record, and we then take care of the customer experience and map it back to the network. You can basically get details of each event that happens on the network. They tell you that there was a dropped call for this particular subscriber in this particular area. So the benefit is that the performance KPIs that were coming in can be augmented or enhanced with the geolocated information for the operators to then say that I now understand the user behaviour between 9 to 5 in a particular area," he added.
Which Telecom Operators are Already Using Geoanalytics and at What Scale?
"Few of the telecom operators have rolled it out at a PAN-India basis, a few of them are doing it with the Urban city perspective, and they are trying to use geoanalytics to do more proactive planning of the network as well as optimisation of the network. Most of the Tier-1 operators are already using geoanalytics," said Bawa.