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Test and measurement
BENCHMARKING
How testing inspires improvement Data collected during a recent benchmarking project carried out by testing equipment and services company Rohde & Schwarz offered a number of mobile network operators better insight into the quality of their and their competitors’ networks. Shakil Ahmed, senior sales director MEA at Rohde & Schwarz, told Ron Murphy why this and other sorts of mobile network testing are so important to Africa’s changing communications needs.
Africa has wide-ranging variations in technologies and commercial needs in each of the countries we focus on. www.communicationsafrica.com
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OHDE & SCHWARZ MOBILE network testing equipment and services are being used to improve network performance and quality in 21 African countries including South Africa where multinational mobile network operator MTN Group relies on technology and expertise from Rohde & Schwarz to optimise its networks. This includes a benchmarking project, for which, as Shakil Ahmed, senior sales director MEA at Rohde & Schwarz, said, his company is playing an instrumental role in testing one of the largest mobile network operators in the MEA region across Africa. It’s doing so with what he calls a harmonised and transparent ETSI standards-based approach. ETSI is a European Standards Organization (ESO). It is a recognisead regional standards body dealing with telecommunications, broadcasting and other electronic communications networks and services. Its standards are now used the world over. Through this testing campaign Rohde & Schwarz grades each MTN network against the network quality of its competitors. This has a number of benefits. In particular the benchmarking project provides MTN with a technical view of how its networks rank relative to their competitors – in turn providing a platform for network improvement and for a commercial investment plan. In addition, through the improvement of the network, the end users benefit from a strong and resilient network, making daily communications tasks easier and better. “Ultimately, this impacts each person’s daily life, bringing the African region together through mobile broadband connectivity,” as Ahmed put it. The testing campaign also provides MTN with the ability to understand its strong network coverage areas and allows it to make the investments needed to increase each network’s
African testing requirements can take in everything from 2G to 5G, depending on the market.
quality in order to cover more people from remote locations across each country. “This continuous improvement,” Ahmed said, “allows operators such as MTN to bring in new technologies early which enable better voice and video quality and data throughput.” Thanks to the data and recommendations from Rohde & Schwarz, the MTN Group has already been able to optimise network quality by 40 percent in 14 African countries. This is an extraordinary improvement, Ahmed agreed. He explained, “The measurements were made using the R&S Smart Benchmarker solution for data collection and R&S Smart
Analytics for the analysis and reporting. Our observations and recommendations are all based on the ETSI TR standards. We are an active member of ETSI and have been lobbying for an open standards-based testing and network performance scoring. This is all well documented in our publicly available white paper focused on network performance scoring from our applied sciences team.*” Of course, Rohde & Schwarz, with over 80 years of history, has plenty of experience in testing in the mobile and wireless communications sector, including different elements of network infrastructure. For example, Communications Africa Issue 1 2022
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