Optimizing Quality of Service & Coverage with Advanced Geospatial Analytics

T-Mobile US, a leading wireless carrier in the United States, has been steadily expanding its network to provide better coverage and quality service to its customers.

Introduction

One of the key challenges for T-Mobile has been to optimize the quality of service and coverage to ensure that its customers get the best possible experience in wireless voice, messaging, and data services.

To address this challenge, T-Mobile has been leveraging advanced geospatial analytics to improve its network performance and customer satisfaction. Here is an overview of how T-Mobile has been using advanced geospatial analytical data to attain the highest return on investment, a massive increase in network improvement and site buildout decisions.

The Challenges

T-Mobile US had been facing challenges in providing reliable and consistent network coverage across different regions in the United States. The company was also struggling to maintain the quality of service levels, which led to a decrease in customer satisfaction.

To address these challenges, T-Mobile needed a solution that would help optimize its network performance by identifying areas of poor coverage and service.

By Dr. Chad Meley

Below are some of the challenges T-Mobile faced that required a comprehensive solution:

● Existing and earlier generation databases did not keep up with the geospatial requirements of current gen big data, causing an urgent need of a solution of large scale geospatial rendering capabilities to maintain real time advanced analytics.

● Needed a solution to keep up with growing pace of the network density of 5G and the growing availability of IOT data harvesting.

● With this approach, T-Mobile was charting new territory replacing the industry standard solution i.e. PostGIS spatial database extender for PostgreSQL object-relational database, with a solution that could scale to process billions of data events, including cell phone & weather.

● Excessive costs and unwanted latency plagued previous generation databases which couldn’t handle location-enriched data for modern geospatial analytics.

● T-Mobile had to provide more monitoring and vertically scaled resources to match the new data set because its previous open-source solution required continuous optimization that was unsustainable for the nature of their initiative. This had resulted in CPU outage problems because of massive spike in downloading data.

The Solution:

T-Mobile leveraged advanced geospatial analytic database

Kinetica to gain insights into network performance and customer experience. Kinetica, the database for time and space, was selected after thorough research for their cutting edge real-time analytical and processing power of geospatial and time-series sensor data.

● Kinetica through a single unified database, ANSI SQL 92 compliant, could apply complex geospatial and predictive modeling to analyze massive geospatial data.

● Kinetica could predict large network build or coverage Return on Investment to rationalize spend prioritization decisions.

● Kinetica had features to add real-time data feeds and dashboards to leverage aggregated data from larger older historical datasets and provide interactive, real time analysis.

● Kinetica developed predictive analysis and advanced analytics to generate deeper network and subscriber insights.

● T-Mobile processed 90 billion spatial object records in under an hour, turning lat/longs provided by Google into atomic routes used for coverage planning using Kinetica in a trial project which would normally take weeks to process otherwise.

Results

Kinetica has been primarily used for large network data sets where layer rendering and visualization is a significant use case thereby increasing the visual fidelity of every building.

Kinetica has had an analytical and visual representation of coverage in every building in the country. This is streamlined through predictive modeling using rich streaming location data that is becoming an analytical baseline in telecom industry.

Kinetica could also in seconds help T-Mobile achieve huge time savings processing massive joins of data sets. It also displays critical coverage and population data that informs strategic decisions like planning network builds by both the business and home Internet groups.

Dr. Chad Meley

CMO at Kinetica with over 20 years of experience as a leader in big data, advanced analytics, and data driven marketing.