NEW YORK-To enhance the capabilities of existing infrastructure, Schema Ltd. has developed a network optimization tool that Yuval Davidor, company founder and president, said can increase capacity by as much as 30 percent.
“You cannot manufacture more spectrum, and we will always want more of it than is available. Three years ago, the issue was the migration from analog to digital. This year, the problem is capital efficiency. In a year-and-a-half, it may well be smart antennas or data overlays,” he said.
“If Wall Street perceives your return on capital investment to be too low, your company (stock) gets a `hold’ instead of a `buy’ rating, and you can’t raise more money for data overlay … Or let’s say Nasdaq declines, so the CFO (chief financial officer) says `we’re not selling securities.’ And then the marketing department says `what do we do now about that new promotion?”‘
Schema, headquartered in Herzlia, Israel, began operations in 1994, engaged in enhancing networks used in the medical, defense and logistics industries. The privately held company, which recently received a third round of venture- capital financing, switched its focus to telecommunications in 1998. It has established offices in Roseland, N.J., Arlington, Va., and Berkeley, Calif.
Customers for the company’s Falcom Telecom Resource Management solutions include Verizon Wireless and Cellcom Greenbay in the United States and Cellcom Israel and Pelephone, the first Israeli wireless carrier.
“Whether it’s a missile balancing system or a telecommunications network, the core technology is the same lady with a different dress,” Davidor said.
“We started out in network optimization only, thinking we’d leave the rest to others. But as Kodak says, `what’s not on the film is not in the photo’. Operators don’t know what’s happening in their networks.”
Typically, radio-frequency engineers conduct drive-by tests a few times each year in order to assess network capacity and reliability. Their accuracy is undermined not only by their infrequent occurrence but also by happenstance, like which side of the road the driver was on, weather conditions and the seasonality of foliage blooms, Davidor said.
“We developed data warehousing and mining capabilities and started to do what everyone else does, which is analyzing the information from the drive tests. But we found a huge gap between what was predicted and what the switches were reporting,” he said.
“Then we went to the (carriers’) marketing departments and gained access to their information, processing it to deduce call failures. We were the first company to plug into and listen to the switches. This is not location-based, but we can infer or deduce location-based information this way.”
Schema also exploited the mobile-assisted measurement capabilities of wireless handsets.
“The phone looks for the clearest signal, so it can measure signal strength from neighboring sectors and from the server inside the base station giving it service,” Davidor said.
“Mobile-assisted measure will let you (the carrier) use your millions of agents to measure signal strengths in short increments. Network elements are always playing catch-up to the capabilities of mobile phones. We were the first company to listen to this information.”
After gathering marketing, drive- test and handset feedback, Schema “creates a pancake layer, integrating and squashing all the sources together for good reliability of information,” Davidor said.
“The real ability is to perform just-in-time response, so you can change marketing within a day.”
He offered this hypothetical example. The engineering department has determined that a new promotion, which the marketing department plans, will increase demands on the network by 20 percent. The engineering department then figures out it can fulfill up to 13 percentage points of the 20-percent increment needed without new cell sites and without causing declines in quality of service.
Instead of having to add 20 percent more capacity to handle the anticipated demand, the carrier would have to add microcells or macrocells for just 7 percent additional capacity. Alternatively, the company could decide to phase in the promotion to determine the customer take-up rate before investing capital in capacity additions.
“Ours is a holistic approach because you cannot separate engineering, operational and marketing departments,” Davidor said.
“Nothing comes close to the optimization we offer, close to an order of magnitude improvement with existing infrastructure.”
Falcom Telecom Resource Management is a radio card that costs between $2,000 $2,500. Each voice channel requires its own card.
