Opinion/Experience about GeoLocation Tools 3G/4G

[HAMMOUCH]

Hello,

I am trying to conduct a study on the GeoLocation solution traffic and I need opinion on the different solutions presented on the market. is there some one who already tried the following solutions:

-NewField
-Actix
-Arieso
-Intucell
-Ultima Mentor
-Reverb
-Groundhog
-...

Cordialy

Thanks

[tyberry]

I like the thread - I also need to understand the merits of these tools and how good they are, what are the use cases they are best for and also what are the data sources, are they real-time and can they actually scale. Everyone of them says yes we can do real-time etc..but can they really do real-time and scale?

hope people provide some really good answers..!!

KR,

[tyberry]

Hi,

I saw this excellent report which would be useful for you and me - may be some one has it on this forum???

Mobile Network Optimization:
http://www.abiresearch.com/research/product/1005842-mobile-network-optimization/

The part I like is this:

KEY INDUSTRY PLAYERS


6.1. Mobile Network Operators
6.2. Mobile Network Infrastructure Vendors
6.3. Optimization Services Vendors
6.4. UE Client Vendors
6.5. RF Test Equipment Vendors
6.6. Network Test Equipment Vendors
6.7. Protocol Analyzers
6.8. Network Planning Vendors
6.9. Backhaul Optimization
6.10. Network Offloading Vendors
6.11. Routing/Transport Monitoring/Optimization Vendors
6.12. DPI Bandwidth Management Vendors
6.13. Video Optimization and Web Optimization Vendors
6.14. Content Delivery Network Vendors
6.15. Policy Vendors
6.16. OSS Vendors
6.17. Network Monitoring Vendors
6.18. SON Vendors

[tyberry]

If I get it I will let you know...it costs $4,200 :-(

[HAMMOUCH]

Thanks a lot tyberry (http://www.finetopix.com/member.php?51981-tyberry) :)

[hartono]

My company conducted trials on several geolocation vendors last year. IMHO

Intucell has SON such as auto nbr optimization, but doesn't really have geolocation. Seems to be limited to UMTS so far. Their best show case is at&t. Cisco acquired Intucell with high premium, which was a big news earlier this year. With Cisco global sales channel I expect Intucell to be very aggressive in SON selling. Reverb is a competitor to Intucell and I don't recall their geoloc function either.

AriesoGEO has good interface. Claimed to be able to handle CHR, but turned out that AriesoGEO could not handle CHR. Vodafone background allowed them to have good reference from Vodafone. Encouraged users to purchase their RF consultancy service to use the product. Recently merged by JDSU.

Groundhog CovMo has good geoloc accuracy and functionality. CovMo and Ultima Mentor ranked the best in our accuracy test. MIT background probably helped. Seems less strong in marketing.

Schema has good ACO functions. Seems less active in recent couples years after being sold to TEOCO for cheap. Some Schema people changed job to Intucell after the merger.

ActixOne's drive test post-processing is good, but its geolocation is not at the same level as dedicated geoloc players. Cellsite's product portfolio seems very similar to Actix's while not as strong as Actix.

My 2 cents.

[tyberry]

Hi Hartono,

What was analysis in the end? Did you go with Geo-analysis tool and SON or with either?

How about Newfield Wireless? I believe they are in some of the tier1s specifically working in the LTE space. What issues have you seen with these solution, Do they really scale for real-time? I'm curious to understand as existing legacy Dbase platform probably wont scale with this amount data volume, velocity etc..especially if these tools are continuously used as real-time for performance troubleshooting. Whats your opinion on this...?

Also seems like no tool can do everything, they seem to be good at one thing and weak in the other areas

[hartono]

We went for geoloc. IMHO SON is overrated. In LTE, NEM should take care of SON, not the 3rd party companies.

Groundhog won the RFP from our company. Delivery done several months ago. Since then the system has been running in near-real-time covering our network nation-wide without difficulty. I am no database expert and have no experience in the scalability from other vendors though.

I might be just me, but I have never heard of Newfield Wireless doing geoloc until last year. Only knew them as a mainly consultancy company for several years. When I was involved in the RFP and evaluation process, NFW was not on the short list so I had no chance to look into their solution.

From a reference in Germany I contacted for evaluation, I have the impression that the first major commercial LTE geoloc deal covering nation-wide deployment was likely in Germany, not USA. Arieso and Groundhog were finalists of the LTE RFP and Groundhog won.

Yes no tool can do everything. I am trying to be as objective as I can, but in case anything I said is wrong feel free to correct me.

[tyberry]

Hi Hartono,

Very useful post and thoughts. I'm also looking at it from an analytics perspective - so looking at an analytics application potentially real-time but also with historical reporting, anomaly detection, predictive analytics and thinking about building a closed-loop feedback mechanism which can interface with RAN Vendors to enable SON associated changes to the network. For example - change load balancing characteristics based on traffic and congestion. I think some of these features are very useful if they can automatically happen to make the RAN network more resilient and shape the network capacity accordingly.

Presumably your a super-user of such RNO/RNP applications? what would thoughts be on this proposition? Would it resonate with Tier 1 carriers?

What SON use cases do you think will be most useful for carriers to implement out of this list?

3GPP release 9
Mobility robustness and handover optimization
RACH optimization
load balancing optimzation**
inter-cell interface coordination

3GPP release 10
coverage and capacity optimization**
enhanced ICIC
cell outage detection and compensation**
self-healing functions
minimize drive test
energy savings

3GPP release 11
automated network mgmt
Troubleshooting
multi-layer, multi RAT heterogeneous networks..

Note: ** these are the ones I think will be useful for carriers over time. We're going to see more and more adoption of small cells given the demands for bandwidth hungry applications so the more automation that can happen will be most beneficial for carriers.

At least this is thinking. Another interesting challenge will be Backhaul :-)

regards,

[TelcoConsultant]

First, thanks for opening the thread guys...

My thoughts in bullets:

- Geolocation and SON is usually comes together but not necessarily. Intucell is playing to be a SON provider, not Geolocation, and Arieso is vice-versa.

- The confusion is mostly based on the source data: the user traces (GPEH, PCHR etc...) User traces will give your PRACH & AS for the most common Geolocation input, and with a smart algorithm you can detect the whereabouts. Meanwhile you will definitely need same data to self-optimize the network.

- @tyberry: I believe Minimizing Drive Test (MDT) is from R8, and all the other features fall under this umbrella. I dont think complete SON is soon but load balancing and coverage is already possible: just hook to NodeB, measure the quality and congestion to play with power & e-tilt and test to start from beginning. It is pretty simple, and if you play within certain limits it is low-risk but still you can sell this as "mighty SON" with a huge advertisement and make a half-a-billion sale to a "I was an IP network vendor but now I wanna play in telco playground too because it look amazing" company...

- Geolocation: it still has a long way to go but smaller cell footprints in dense areas make even the oldest algorithms more accurate everyday.

- Vendors: I never used myself but what I heard is Arieso seems quite good in Geolocation-only tools whereas Ultima-Mentor is giving a reasonable compromise PM+RNO+Geolocation. But still, this is not a comprehensive comparison. @HAMMOUCH, can you please be more specific. What is the purpose this comparison, the names you mention are not in the same game. Intucell & Arieso is doing only specific parts whereas Actix and Schema(or Teoco or whatever) is claiming to do PM & SQM & CEM and everything. These products are processing additional data just to support their PM solutions, not for pure geolocation.

- @hartono: Spending 5+yrs in tool development as an architect, I honestly see no reason why one product can not do all of it. It seems to me quite possible, of course hard but possible. But there is two main problems: 1. The old products/companies are not flexible to extend to these new gadgets The management does not see the value to invest in traces/new algorithms or even if they are happy to invest the product is like an old diesel machine which is quite hard to integrate such a new feature. 2.New companies are usually concentrated on this specific areas and most of them are looking for a big buyer. Intucell and Arieso did it, I am expecting IBM, E******* and HP to go for new mergers and every small company is looking to be the next one.

I have some other thoughts but need to get back to work now. :) I will be happy to discuss further. Finetopix is an amazing source for RNO guys but hard to find ppl who are interested in different aspects of telco industry. PM, SQM, CEM... The game is changing, very rapidly. Lets follow it up...

KR

[HAMMOUCH]

Thanks for those very useful posts.

@TelcoConsultant: I want to know more precisely what is the advantages of EVERY solutions compared to others in terms of compatibility, accuracy in the case of the Geolocalization, and parameters (Tilts & power...) that can be changed by SON.

I don't know if anyone has technical papers on these solutions of Geolocalization and SON.

Thanks

Cordially

[qaqa]

Hi hartono

thank you for the valuable information. can you confirm whether you are feeding the Groundhog Geoloc with trace data, i.e., GPEH, Megamon or CHR from vendor or a probe data.

[Vladislav]

Hi
I would like share my expirience a little bit.
There is a tool Xeus from Aexio - it can make geolocation based on CHR/Huawei, GPEH/E*******, Megamon/NSN or CTS/ZTE files. Accuracity of geolocation is square 100x100 m - the size of one bin. Not all the traced calls can be geolocated.
Very nice tool for network visualization and deep events analysis. Plus it has smartphone analysis module, where fast dormancy performance can be checked and phone analysis based on IMEI. But it doesn't have SON features - there will be no automatic optimization suggestions (only for neighbor plan, but also should be approved).

As about other mentioned tools I worked with:
Ultima Mentor - very powerful tool for the 3G optimization and troubleshooting. It also has geolocation function and a lot of other possibilities. I can share the docs if somebody will be interested. Mentor can propose Tilts/azimuth, CPICH Power, Neighbor plan, SC plan and some other parameters optimization actions.

Newfield (from TrueCall) - neve worked by myself but I intend several their webinars. This tool can make geolocation and as I understand with very good precision, but that is it. Mostly can be used for network and their events/coverage visualization. There will be not so much help in optimization process from it.

Reverb - this is a SON product (antenna based and now they are releasing parameters SON). No geolocation but it is a closed-loop optimization system. In theory can make optimization without human intervention. But it should be configured very carefully and many tests will be needed.

Actix - from my opinion this is not the strongest feature for this tool. But I didn't worked with it very deep.

Also I heard about Celsite SON tool (COPS) - by the description it can make geolocation and provide automatic optimization suggestions.

Hope it will be helpful

[tyberry]

Hi Telco,Hartono

I have a question, I'm looking at the load balancing feature and most importantly I'm thinking from the perspective that this will applied in SON by RAN vendors when there is congestion on the cell site, but question:- how will the congested site inform the UE and users which neighbor to attach to? How is this SON features going to be implemented by RAN vendors or has it already been implemented?

There reason why I'm asking is as follows;

Supposing there is an analytics applications that provides insights and now this application sees that certain segment of users are using video applications and a specific sets of site(s) are struggling, this information from the analytics application is sent to a SON controller or what ever system that the RAN vendor implements this function into and this controller automatically makes changes to the RF interface and request all traffic to be load balanced to its nearest other cell site. This could be a good use case for busy place in dense populations for e.g. airports, metro areas....

Now also would be interesting if anyone of you have any information of how E*******/ALU/Huawei/NSN are implementing SON features in the network, I mean where is the SON controller function going to sit in? will it be OSSRC, NetAct, M2000 etc???

Any thoughts around this and also any thoughts on closed loop feedback use cases for IMS and VOLTE would be very interesting....

A quick reply is most appreciated...!!

[saullow]

share this book bro.. :)

[superman_uz]

Hi,
Thank you all for an interesting conversation.
I have some questions about another aspect of geolocation tool: data latency

Does anyone have some experience about latency of each tool processing? What is the average time interval between a call failure on the network and the time when it can be found in geolocation tool?
Can those trace-based tools listed here be used as a part of CEM solution? Can Network equipment provide traces for all of the network events?

[finetopicbooks]

Groundhog CovMo is really good.

[amadeo]

Hi Everyone.
It is very interesting discussion.
I really curious what that feed truecall from newsfeed. They claimed that they can drill down from UE to IMS.
Are they using CHR/Huawei, GPEH/E******* & Megamon/NSN?


cheers,

Amadeo

[amadeo]

Hi TelcoConsultant,
I am very eager to develop SON solution with my company. I find this discussion is very usefull to give me an insight where to put myself in the big game.
Maybe we can join force to strive into the game ?

cheers,

Amadeo

[electron]

Hi all,

I saw a personal developed tool to help optimization engineer which did not need any machine for operation. It was using OSS itself and reporting main KPIs and reporting worst cells with some counters related and taking action for some problems ( some parameter corrections, Neighbor additions, Main KPI, Worst cell reporting) all of these actions could be taken and reported with 15 minute resolution by sending automatic email. It was very effective tool during roll out and daily monitoring and network maintenance.


Cheers

[amadeo]

Hi Electron,
Do you happen to know the developer?

cheers

[electron]

Hi Amadeo,


I just got his contact check ur private message.


Cheers
Hi Electron,
Do you happen to know the developer?

cheers

[amadeo]

Thank's electron. I sent him an email but hasn not get back to me yet. I hope i can hire him :)

[amadeo]

Hi All,
Anyone here working in the operator side? I am wondering how much they charge for a SON product in different countries. This certainly help me to understand to competition. You can PM me about it.
Thank's for everyone who contribute.

cheers,

[itemboleh]

Hi i've lots of offer working on this so called geo location company but i think this tool is not really needed. Why because all of those are internal trace that will eat internal NE resources. You don't want to do internal trace so often.

That what i told to those company. It might be useful for limited purpose such as a really VIP subscriber. In the other hand probe based geolocation is ridiculous since you need to invest in every interface. Lots of CEO that i talk with said that the investment is not worth enough.

The vendor need to separate their internal trace platform like what Huawei started then this tool will become really work in operational. But what Huawei did isn't sufficient yet since their system for internal trace is not capable to capture all traffic means that some messages are lost in tracing.

Another ways to make this happen is that vendor and trace vendor cooperate together to plant some trace HW inside vendor HW.

@just an opinion from a humble engineer :victory:

[hartono]

Hi hartono

thank you for the valuable information. can you confirm whether you are feeding the Groundhog Geoloc with trace data, i.e., GPEH, Megamon or CHR from vendor or a probe data.

qaqa, sorry I missed your message in the thread.


We are feeding the Groundhog geoloc from the vendors, not probes, in 24x7 continuous mode.


During a reference call, we got confirmation from an operator that Groundhog can take data from probes too. However, probes are probably too expensive to worth it and most probes do not support 24x7 feeding except some very expensive models.

[hartono]

Hi All,
Anyone here working in the operator side? I am wondering how much they charge for a SON product in different countries. This certainly help me to understand to competition. You can PM me about it.
Thank's for everyone who contribute.

cheers,

The price range of SON product is usually several million dollars, depending on size of network or throughput. I guess SON vendors might try to charge higher price in high OPEX countries, and lower in low OPEX countries, because the ROI of SON is typically calculated based on saving OPEX.

I am not a big fan of SON because it means cutting headcounts!!

[hartono]

Hi TelcoConsultant,
I am very eager to develop SON solution with my company. I find this discussion is very usefull to give me an insight where to put myself in the big game.
Maybe we can join force to strive into the game ?

cheers,

Amadeo

Amadeo, I am not sure if it is a good idea for you to join the flock of SON vendors. There are already many of them. Big vendors such as E*******, Cisco, etc, also released their own SON, and it might be difficult for a new entrant to compete with them?

[hartono]

Hi tyberry,

I am no SON expert, but all SONs should have some kind of load balancing feature you referred to. Before there was SON, there was "handover on traffic" and many related mechanisms that help on load balancing already.

From talking to my colleague, my impression is that E******* and Cisco has their own SON modules. Huawei claims to have their own SON features but doesn't sound convincing. Huawei also works with some 3rd party SON vender, maybe until they get their own SON developed? Rumor has it that Huawei and couples SON suppliers may have the ability to take Groundhog geoloc input to improve SON, because taking geolocation data provides much granular details of the traffic than cell-level information.

In case anything I said is wrong, please feel free to correct me.


Hi Telco,Hartono

I have a question, I'm looking at the load balancing feature and most importantly I'm thinking from the perspective that this will applied in SON by RAN vendors when there is congestion on the cell site, but question:- how will the congested site inform the UE and users which neighbor to attach to? How is this SON features going to be implemented by RAN vendors or has it already been implemented?

There reason why I'm asking is as follows;

Supposing there is an analytics applications that provides insights and now this application sees that certain segment of users are using video applications and a specific sets of site(s) are struggling, this information from the analytics application is sent to a SON controller or what ever system that the RAN vendor implements this function into and this controller automatically makes changes to the RF interface and request all traffic to be load balanced to its nearest other cell site. This could be a good use case for busy place in dense populations for e.g. airports, metro areas....

Now also would be interesting if anyone of you have any information of how E*******/ALU/Huawei/NSN are implementing SON features in the network, I mean where is the SON controller function going to sit in? will it be OSSRC, NetAct, M2000 etc???

Any thoughts around this and also any thoughts on closed loop feedback use cases for IMS and VOLTE would be very interesting....

A quick reply is most appreciated...!!

[hartono]

Hi,
Thank you all for an interesting conversation.
I have some questions about another aspect of geolocation tool: data latency

Does anyone have some experience about latency of each tool processing? What is the average time interval between a call failure on the network and the time when it can be found in geolocation tool?
Can those trace-based tools listed here be used as a part of CEM solution? Can Network equipment provide traces for all of the network events?

We did reference calls regarding data latency of several geoloc suppliers. Adding my own experience on top of it, my take is that:

Groundhog, Arieso (JDSU), and Newfield (TEK) geoloc: Latency depends on source data. For example, if GPEH comes in every 15 min, depending on hardware computation power, Groundhog and Arieso could take like 7-10 additional minutes to process 15 min of batch data in 3G. For Megamon GEO feed which comes in streaming, the latency should be less than 1 min.

For LTE, Groundhog and Newfield can do near-real-time streaming in our LTE trial, while Arieso did not proceed with a trial. My company chose Groundhog. (I think it is fair to comment that Newfield's 3G is just a "prototype", so I cannot comment on its latency in 3G.)

Actix (Amdocs) and Aexio (InfoVista): Long latency. They cannot do near-real-time nor 24x7 processing for geoloc. I think they only run in batch sessions. One hour data took many hours for Actix to geoloc using big HP servers in our trial, although the hardware was higher end than what used by other suppliers. So it's not likely that Actix can ever do 24x7 or streaming as the queue will only get longer and longer. Aexio is designed to handle relatively small session data. They don't belong to the same basket as the better suppliers.

Yes, it is popular to use geoloc as part of CEM nowadays. Our CEM has directly interface with our geoloc.

[zeldalcl]

Dear Terry and friends!
Does anyone have the report which Terry mentioned, please share for us.

Thanks friends


Hi,

I saw this excellent report which would be useful for you and me - may be some one has it on this forum???

Mobile Network Optimization:
http://www.abiresearch.com/research/product/1005842-mobile-network-optimization/

The part I like is this:

KEY INDUSTRY PLAYERS


6.1. Mobile Network Operators
6.2. Mobile Network Infrastructure Vendors
6.3. Optimization Services Vendors
6.4. UE Client Vendors
6.5. RF Test Equipment Vendors
6.6. Network Test Equipment Vendors
6.7. Protocol Analyzers
6.8. Network Planning Vendors
6.9. Backhaul Optimization
6.10. Network Offloading Vendors
6.11. Routing/Transport Monitoring/Optimization Vendors
6.12. DPI Bandwidth Management Vendors
6.13. Video Optimization and Web Optimization Vendors
6.14. Content Delivery Network Vendors
6.15. Policy Vendors
6.16. OSS Vendors
6.17. Network Monitoring Vendors
6.18. SON Vendors

[melkaiy]

guys,

i am using a new geo-location tool. need your advice to be like an expert like you.

[vasili_koslov]

I heard a tool for geolocation. its name is "Planogeo" . It is a very useful tool. You can decode CHR and GPEH files in this tool.
Link for youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1sNDiK3O3E. I found who developed it. It is developed by Plano Engineering in Turkey.

[amadeo]

I always wonder how does people decode GPEH, CHR or Megamon data. It should require the metadata as reference to decode it right??? How does this people get it, i am trying to get one but no luck at all. Anyone has a clue??

[amadeo]

Hi Guys,
Does anyone have files/documents that i can use as reference to parse either GPEH, CHR or Megamon? I am obsessed to do this parsing :) Pls help.

cheers..

[electron]

Hi Guys,
Does anyone have files/documents that i can use as reference to parse either GPEH, CHR or Megamon? I am obsessed to do this parsing :) Pls help.

cheers..

Hi,

It is not that much difficult to parse GPEH bin files, importance is the technique used to parse huge amount of data and save in a DB (Speed, efficiency,etc). One of guys who developed home made tool worked on it and got the result and already his smart phone analysis module and ANR is ready. As i remember lately he was working on accessibility related analysis. But nothing is for free in the world and i guess he is looking for partner as well.


Cheers