NEW YORK-Taxicab, overnight mail delivery and other fleet vehicle drivers may soon be doing double duty as remote monitors of wireless telecommunications networks, according to a plan by LCC International Inc., McLean, Va.
The radio-frequency engineering firm recently acquired European Technology Partner, a company based in Oslo, Norway, which has developed several product generations of CellAd, a remote network monitoring device installed on fleet vehicles in Europe and Asia. As now configured, CellAd interfaces with Global System for Mobile communications systems, said Tricia Drenning, director of corporate communications for LCC. By the end of the year, LCC and ETP hope to offer a version of CellAd that works with Code Division Multiple Access systems, she said.
“CellAD is a cornerstone product that introduces the concept of a fully automated field measurement device to the wireless industry, and is believed to be the first of its kind,” LCC said. “Taking advantage of fleet industries, which already are mobile, it automatically collects data from a specified geographic area and can monitor all parameters of a network 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
For LCC, which has been involved in the design and optimization of more than 200 wireless systems on five continents, introducing CellAd to the North American marketplace may provide an opportunity to extend its service offerings to the ongoing oversight of telecommunications networks.
“As we envision it, we would sell quantities of CellAd to carriers and they would install them on fleet vehicles,” Drenning said. “(But) one of our goals (also) is to become a provider of outsourced products and services-a niche that is untapped from an engineering standpoint in wireless, although it is already in [functions like] customer care and billing.”
CellAd is a hardware device that may be used in conjunction with LCC’s suite of System Monitoring and Response Tools, or SMART software, which goes by the product name of CellSight (Cellular Statistical Information Gathering and Historical Trend Analysis).
In various stages of development, but intended to be deployed later this year, are several CellSight enhancements, LCC said:
A quantitative date reporting service that classifies and prioritizes areas of critical need for orderly problem solving by the network operator;
An automated switch and data collection and reporting system incorporating alarm and maintenance capabilities;
Automated data upload from planning tools to operator switches that will allow fast, accurate comparison without manual retuning;
And simultaneous collection of voice quality and RF data to allow engineers to quickly ascertain the quality score and rationale for data results.
