H3G Austria’s Mobile Network Excels in Third-Party Testing

"We are fully geared to make this project a great success and improve our network quality on a constant basis. We value ZTE as our most competitive network partner here in Austria," said Matthias Baldermann, CTO of H3G Austria.”

At the end of November 2011, Europe's largest telecommunications publication, Connect, organized formal tests on the mobile networks of eleven operators. These operators included Telekom, Vodafone, O2 and E-plus in Germany; Swisscom, Orange and Sunrise in Switzerland; and H3G, AT-Mobile and Orange in Austria.  Download speed, upload speed, and user experience were tested. In the download speed test, H3G Austria’s average rate across the network was 9 Mb/s, better than that of the second-fastest network. “H3G Austria was not only the fastest network, it also achieved a score of 476 out of a possible 500 in customer evaluations of overall network performance,” said Connect editor Bernd Theiss.

H3G Austria is a fully owned subsidiary of Hutchison 3G, a multinational mobile service provider that operates in several countries. In March 2010, H3G Austria chose ZTE as its partner to deploy a high-performance, future-proof mobile broadband network. ZTE was asked to swap 4080 base station sites and reconstruct transmission and core networks by the end of 2011. It was also asked provide six years of managed services.

ZTE’s industry-leading SDR base stations were used for HSPA+ services. In February 2011, H3G Austria launched its DC-HSPA+ network with download speeds of up to 42 Mb/s. H3G Austria commercialized its LTE network in November 2011. The LTE network is built on ZTE’s latest Uni-RAN and Uni-Core solutions, which help H3G Austria make full use of existing equipment and save CAPEX. ZTE’s professional O&M solution ensures efficient engineering and O&M work as well as smooth migration from 2G to 3G and 4G.

ZTE’s managed services include corrective maintenance, preventive maintenance, change management, spare parts management, performance management, configuration management, quality management, and expert technical support. The swapover of H3G’s base station sites involved replacing large amounts of third-party base stations and reusing existing auxiliary devices such as power supplies, towers, air conditioners, shelters, relay nodes, SDH hubsites and microwave equipment. Maintaining this diverse equipment is a great challenge. To ensure high stability, high security, and high availability for H3G Austria’s mobile network, ZTE outlined seven key points for network O&M:

● Respect local culture and leverage the advantages of local employees in communicating with clients and managing local contractors. Assign important roles to local employees in project management, and ensure local employees account for 90 percent of a project team.

● Outsource some O&M work to original H3G maintenance staff. This alleviates the difficulty of maintaining third-party infrastructure before they are swapped over and allows original maintenance personnel to remain employed.

● Partner with competent contractors who can maintain devices from different manufacturers. They can jointly cope with the risks in maintaining third-party devices and existing network equipment.

● Adopt the best and most widely accepted O&M practices, such as eTOM and ITIL, to ensure standard and professional O&M.

● Attach great importance to training ZTE O&M personnel, local contractors and H3G O&M personnel and improve their project execution skills.

● Make network O&M processes transparent, manageable, and controllable based on quantifiable data.

● Adopt a customized O&M scheme to implement resource integration and smooth migration from 2G to 3G.

Before the swapover of base station sites, only about 80 percent of H3G’s SLA conditions were being met. Since ZTE swapped the network and took over O&M, monthly fulfillment of SLA has been above 99%. After one year of professional O&M by ZTE, network KPIs have significantly improved. Download speed has increased from 1.8 Mb/s to 42 Mb/s or even 100 Mb/s in some areas. The subscriber base has increased from 600,000 to 1 million and is expected to reach 6.5 million by the end of 2015. The volume of network traffic has grown from 8G to 13.2G, an increase of 70 percent. The call accessibility rate has reached 98 percent, and the PDP activation rate has reached 99.5 percent. As a result, customer satisfaction has been substantially improved. The cutting-edge mobile broadband network jointly built by H3G Austria and ZTE is now delivering a variety of feature-rich services to subscribers across the whole of Austria.

H3G Austria is reaping profits from the new mobile broadband network. Its success has proved that in the era of mobile broadband, where user experience matters the most, a stable, high-speed mobile network is the key for operators to get a head start on the competition, reduce CAPEX, and improve profit margin.