Caesarea, Israel. CellMining Ltd., a provider of self-organizing networks (SON) and subscriber network experience solutions, today announced that its SONATA user-centric SON platform has been extended to include a range of new key performance indicators (KPIs) for customer experience (CX). SONATA is based on CellMining’s Subscriber Network Analytics technology, which analyzes subscriber usage patterns correlated with service and quality events to deliver comprehensive and extremely accurate network optimization.
As networks evolve through the adoption of NFV (network function virtualization) and SDN (software defined networks), allowing networks to become massively more scalable, a key challenge will be to ensure the provision of the reliable and seamless experience that subscribers demand across a range of different devices, services, and use cases. By providing a scalable platform, SONATA addresses this challenge and satisfies the needs of SDN/NFV networks, not only for LTE-A and LTE-A Pro but also working towards early 5G rollouts.
At the heart of SONATA is the Subscriber Experience Hub, which integrates into external CEM systems to provide insight into network experience via a detailed and informative dashboard. Five functional modules correlate every aspect of the subscriber experience—voice and data quality, device incompatibility, inbound roamers, geo-spot analysis, and business accounts—against the different levels of subscriber service level agreements (VIP, individual, corporate, roamer, etc.), thereby enabling issues to be flagged and prioritized for proactive customer care.
“CellMining’s innovative CX-driven approach, combined with its subscriber-centric data analysis, enables us to work with a set of actionable KPIs that no other SON system can produce,” said Shmuel Morad, CTO of CellMining. “The introduction of these additional KPIs to the SONATA platform has increased the range of customer experience metrics on which the optimization is based, making it the most comprehensive CX-based solution on the market today.”
More than twenty new KPIs have been introduced in SONATA version 4.0, which analyzes subscriber information and correlates it with network parameters in order to drive better decisions and SON actions such as load balancing and automatic neighbor relation (ANR). One example is the Device Type KPI—the balance of different types and makes of device, categorized by the cells and sectors that they most frequently appear in. This KPI makes a valuable contribution to SON decisions such as energy savings, where the radio may be turned off during particular times of day to reduce energy consumption. Another is the Directional Drops KPI, which singles out the mobility issues of subscribers who are on the move—for example in a vehicle or a high-speed train—from the issues of those who are stationary. This is invaluable for optimizing challenging handover scenarios when users are travelling at speed.
The Inbound Roamers KPI helps to secure high quality communication services for subscribers roaming internationally away from their home networks, thus protecting a significant revenue source. The Unavailability Events KPI flags holes in network coverage, and the subscribers and roads that are affected by them.
CellMining will be showcasing SONATA and the new KPIs at the Mobile World Congress February 22-25 in Barcelona.