Configuration Management
Network engineers must often contend with information based on ‘rules of thumb’ from operations, guesses from marketing, and imperfect knowledge of the current network configuration and capacity. The key to making network engineering’s job easier is to provide them with good data on which to base network improvement decisions, and help them to quickly and easily find configuration errors within the network.
IVLP is a configuration management tool that enables your engineers to improve network quality by providing visibility to the live network configuration. By loading the actual network configuration into the planning tool on a daily basis, IVLP ensures engineers have the appropriate data on which to make network improvement decisions.
Network auditing is also greatly simplified. By comparing the live network configuration with the desired baseline, IVLP highlights configuration discrepancies, which are a primary cause of poor network performance. IVLP, our configuration management tool, can also generate parameter change and site integration transcript files. This automated approach is many times faster and more accurate than the standard manual approach generally employed, leading to further operational efficiencies and better network performance.
ACCURATE PLANNING
Making good planning and optimization decisions requires the data in your planning tool to align with your network. Multiple departments making daily network changes causes drift between the two, making accurate planning impossible and requiring significant post launch optimization.
IVLP’s automatically loads your live network configuration into the planning tool. This allows your engineers to be certain all optimization changes have been fed back into the planning tool and they are planning network changes from a baseline that matches the live network. This leads to network designs that perform far better upon implementation.
NETWORK AUDITING
Confirming the live network configuration does not vary from the planned one is often the first check to identifying the root cause of poor network performance. With upwards of 5000 parameter settings on a base station, finding mis-configured settings manually is difficult and time consuming. IVLP addresses this by loading all the site parameters into a database and highlighting the discrepancies between an expected baseline and the current network settings.
This helps engineers quickly identify discrepancies. For example, the power on a site may have been turned down while antenna maintenance was undertaken but not turned up again, resulting in poor coverage for a large number of customers.
We typically find around 5 parameter configuration errors per cell when we first install IVLP. This equates to 100,000 errors for a 20,000 cell network. Rectification of these errors provides an immediate improvement in network performance.
NETWORK WRITE
Engineers are often under pressure to meet aggressive rollout plans. Manually generating data transcript files to deploy sites or optimize parameters is time consuming and prone to errors. It has also become an extremely complex task with all the dependencies for the multiple technologies and vendors in the network needing to be taken into account when building the transcripts.
IVLP, our configuration management tool, can generate parameter change and site integration transcript files, while accounting for all dependencies and any configuration business rules that exist. This automated approach is many times faster and more accurate than the standard manual approach generally employed leading to further operational efficiencies and better network performance.