BARCELONA, Spain—Ericsson’s first deployments of its Ericsson Expert Analytics (EEA) solution in North America is with T-Mobile. The deployments, which the company hopes to expand soon, are used to gain insights into how its customers are experiencing a range of services. Those services include VoLTE, video calling over LTE, rich communication services and mobile broadband.
According to the companies, VoLTE not only brought improved voice codecs and coverage, but it also enabled T-Mobile to leverage more spectrum for LTE, giving T-Mobile customers a faster network with “excellent voice quality.”
T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray took the opportunity to boast a little bit. “We’re the global leader, with 80 percent of all voice calls on our network over LTE. And the Ericsson Expert Analytics platform enables us to resolve call-related issues in real-time, so we can keep delivering the awesome experience our customers have come to expect,” he said in a statement.
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T-Mobile is the first North American deployment of this particular product. EEA is a flagship product within the OSS area where the Swedish vendor has been active in the customer experience management area for some time.
But in the beginning, maybe two or three years ago, it had some teething problems in terms of functionality and scalability, according to Jan Karlsson, acting head of Business Area Digital Services at Ericsson.
“Now we have not only more references but those references have gone into production, and some of those references are huge,” he told FierceWirelessTech at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona. "T-Mobile US is the No. 1 reference using it in all kinds of ways to better understand the network quality from a customer perspective."
Karlsson called it a “very, very important product” and one that the Ericsson managed services team is eager to roll out to more areas as it’s seen as a game changer.
Karlsson was named acting head of the Business Area Digital Services unit after Ulf Ewaldsson stepped down earlier this year after completing the build-out phase of the unit. Ewaldsson then assumed a role as advisor to CEO Börje Ekholm. Karlsson told FierceWirelessTech there’s a lot going on in Digital Services and he hopes to be a candidate for the long-term position.
According to Ericsson, EEA one of the most advanced telecom analytics platforms, ingesting data from thousands of multivendor sources and processing all the nationwide VoLTE calls and data sessions to correlate and produce 8 billion records daily. Ericsson’s algorithms promise to help T-Mobile identify VoLTE issues faster and with greater granularity than traditional tools.
Ericsson Expert Analytics analyzes data from any radio technology, 4G/WiFi/Narrowband IoT and any multivendor radio, packet core and IMS network.
Apparently, there was a close cooperation between Ericsson and T-Mobile on the development of the product, which will give T-Mobile faster time-to-market to proactively identify and resolve customer-impacting issues.
“We continue to define and develop business rules and data models that operators can use to derive actionable insights from network data, with Ericsson Expert Analytics setting the industry standard for customer experience management,” Karlsson said in a prepared statement. “Our use cases take big data analytics out of the laboratory and into real-time operations, transforming how operators can deliver services for subscribers.”
The initial deployment serves hundreds of engineering users, and T-Mobile has plans to extend the solution across the organization, with support for real-time and offline analytics use cases for customer care, operations, device analytics, internet of things analytics and marketing.