NetWorkS! Case Study

Infrastructure sharing is an interesting business model that redefines competition between two telcos. In this model they collaborate at the resource level (operated by a NetCo), becoming in fact one company which equally serves two service providers (ServCos) that are still competing in the service space. The driver behind this idea is a need to reduce the cost of huge infrastructure investments, needed
to meet the growing demand for data services and as a result, network capacity.

In July 2011 two main Polish operators, PTC (the operator of T-Mobile Poland) and PTK Centertel (the operator of Orange Poland) entered a 15-year agreement for sharing the mobile access network. The joint venture company, NetWorkS!, was formed by the two operators to manage and develop their consolidated 2G/3G network now and 4G network in the future, with the aim of enhancing network coverage and quality. Taking into account that both partners are also competing on the service level, one of the main challenges of this project was how to secure alignment between the shared Fault Management domain and the Service Assurance domain managed individually by the collaborating (and at the same time competing) parties.

Since this is the first infrastructure sharing case in Poland, the crucial issues for NetWorkS! to deal with were:

• To centralize monitoring of the network that was initially composed of two independent environments
• To improve Customer Experience for both T-Mobile and Orange customers, based on the shared infrastructure
• To reduce costs by joining the effort at network management level
• To implement a unified umbrella solution in the assurance area, above different NEM/EMS systems
• To increase network coverage, both outdoor and indoor
• To assure high quality of network parameters, according to the defined agreements
• To assure controlled access to information about the network for third parties

Comarch Fault Management has all the necessary functionalities to support an infrastructure sharing scenario, which has been already appreciated by numerous Tier 1 operators, such as MTS Russia or Telefónica O2 Germany.

Comarch’s solution was already proven by PTC (T-Mobile), and has obtained high evaluation and continuously maintained very high standards of products and services. It was natural to benefit from that experience and expand the cooperation to the new structures.

Thanks to the product’s transparent architecture, easy adaptation to accommodate new management systems and capabilities of flexible integration with external data sources, it was possible to finish the implementation in two and a half months.

An additional reason NetWorkS! decided to implement Comarch Fault Management is that the solution is able to work with partners’ service assurance systems, and thanks to using the CFS-RSF-Resource model, it can manage resource alarms for the different services of T-Mobile and Orange customers.

It was crucial for both operators that the project ensures high operational efficiency. This is why the main goal of this implementation was to automate the selected processes, and to standardize and minimize the amount of alarms that need to be handled by system operators.

This is why the solution was based on Comarch Fault Management that can effectively monitor problems and defects in the entire telecom network. Through continuous monitoring of the operator’s network resources, the system enables collection, visualization and tracking of event occurrence, creating a unified umbrella system over the various network element management systems.

It was very important for NetWorkS! to have an ability to configure the alarm acquisition and further processing by themselves, which the solution provided. Furthermore important benefits of the solution included acceleration of the reaction on the network problems, achieved by filtering and enriching events by using complex processing rules and correlation mechanisms. Thanks to this feature, the operator now receives only meaningful and significant alarm information. Such functionality enables additional estimations of potential impact of the network problems on the provided services and enables to take appropriate action proactively.

Thanks to the Geographic Information System (GIS) functionality, the joint network operator can now benefit from presentation of objects with a relation to the geographical coordinates of vector and raster maps. This helps to control network configuration and perform advanced geographical data analysis, as well as to speed up further repairs (thanks to providing detailed information about the exact location of faulty elements).