GSM Is Stepping into another Billion Age

Over 15 years development, 2 billion people are serving by GSM mobile network globally. Although the mobile penetration ratio in some regions such as East Europe have been exceeded 80%, the markets with mobile penetration ratio below 50% such as low population density, low mobile penetration ratio, or low ARPU areas are still very profitable. A huge growth potential for GSM market is contained in these markets. It is widely believed that another one billion subscribers are going to join GSM network in the near future.

As we know, GSM is such a mobile network with the most universal coverage in the world so far, which features huge subscribers, low entry threshold, excellent quality on both voice and low-rate data services, the most mature technologies, and with abundant network planning and optimizing experiences. GSM network will admittedly be a major profitable role to create revenue for operators in next 5 to 10 years. Nonetheless, declining ARPU, increasing business-driven costs, and increasingly homologous competitive environment are now confronting mobile operators. Particularly,

Profitable market is now shifting to Greenfield. Relatively low earning of potential users determines low ARPU. How to economically extend current network coverage and attract more new subscribers in the area of sparse population so as to generate revenue will be a key challenge for GSM operators. A wider coverage solution with fewer sites is desired.

Network equipment aging leads decreasing network performance and high churn rate. Frequent network adjustment is due to unacceptable service quality. New attractive services are going to be increasingly harder to be deployed on current GSM network. More and more expenditure spending on product promotion, advertising, market developing, interoperability, and etc. It is no doubt that operators are under heavy revenue pressure. A cost-effective and fast way on improving network performance and customer perception wanted..

The competitiveness of GSM operation is going to be more homologous, which means it is quite difficult for operators to be outstanding than ever before. How to stimulate end-users to use services as much as they can? Instead of similar tariff, services, and promotions, good voice QoS and unique attractive services are preferred by customers.

Being the period of transition from 2G to 3G, operators very prudently decided to continuous to invest on existing 2G networks. How to guarantee the current investment rational and equipments prevailing in 3G era?

Huawei EnerG GSM Solution Aims at Improving the Value of Mobile Network in Greenfield

Guided with the Market-oriented, Requirements-driven and Win-win belief, Huawei dedicates its effort in EnerG GSM solution to meet the customer's requirement. By analyzing specified revenue, business, and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) models, Huawei EnerG GSM solution is able to balance the network capacity and coverage, network deployment, and evolution in terms of increasing subscribers' ARPU and attracting more low-end subscribers. Meanwhile, it helps operators to decrease business-driven costs, Total Cost of Ownership, and churn rate effectively, and finally achieve maximum network value and customers' gains.

Huawei EnerG GSM solution provides operators with superior coverage enhancement solution, fast and economical swap solution, critical voice and differentiated service solution, and future-oriented evolution solution to meet different purposes of application.

Superior Coverage Enhancement Solution

Enlarged coverage not only features better network coverage but also improves network performance. At the same time, revenue will be promoted through attracting more new users. In that case, a cost-effective coverage solution could be exactly matching such demand.

With regard to CAPEX model, civil works occupies about 42% of total costs on site. Therefore, the best way for CAPEX decrease is to reduce the number of sites. Theoretically, coverage radius could be expanded by 20% per 3dB gain on both uplink and downlink, which means coverage area will be increased by around 40%. As a consequence, sites will be reduced by approximately 30%.

Huawei series dual TRX BTS adopts various advanced Huawei GSM BTS radio technologies such as 60W output power, up to -112.5dB high static receiving sensitivity, Transmitting Diversity, PBT (Power Boost Technology), 4-Way Receiving Diversity, ICC (Interference Counteract Combining), AMR (Adaptive Multi-Rate) etc, the number of site and O&M cost can be reduced significantly. At the same time, dynamic conversion between Coverage Mode and Capacity Mode can be implemented by Huawei GSM BTS. As traffic growing, Coverage Mode can be shifted into Capacity Mode through data configuration in case of expansion requirement.

Additionally, Extended Cell technology can support up to 219bit TA (Timing Advance), and 120km single cell coverage. It makes communication for fisherfolk working in sea level possible. Both respect for implementation of social responsibility and revenue can be achieved at the same time.

Fast and Economical Swap Solution

The issue related to aging equipments is known as one of the most critical factors, it has vital impact on network performance. Unsatisfied customer experience and losing branding force owns to declining system performance such as low call success rate and handover rate, increasing radio interference, and non-attractive services etc. It follows that operators have to invest more on network adjustment and business-driven including advertising, promotion, and interoperability etc even when ARPU is decreasing.

For year's long time running, some network equipments are being or closing to the end of its life-cycle; therefore, a quick and economical network adjustment solution required urgently.

Huawei has 10 years rich experience of radio network construction, planning and optimization for more than 5,000 projects and swapping record of more than 100 K TRXs. Combined with abundant network implementation and deep comprehensive in GSM industry, Huawei reshapes a very competitive swap solution introduced to help operators to tackle encountered and coming problems. It features three following characteristics:

Strong geographical environments compatibilities enable flexible site acquisition with less dependence on associated facilities. Especially, Huawei all-in-one series outdoor BTSs including BTS3002C, BTS3006C, and BTS3012AE, are highly customer-focused design that targets to meet all application scenarios. Broader voltage range, wider environment temperature compatibility, IP55 high protection grade, solar power supply, various transmission means including optional optical transmission and microwave module, and flexible installation (tower, against wall, by pole, etc) determine that those BTSs can be installed everywhere and it is no need for an equipment room. These characteristics make site acquisition very convenient and much easier. Besides that, BTS3006C is a new BTS that applies Huawei intelligent fan cooling and nature cooling technologies. Compared with hot-exchange BTS, it has smaller cubage and weight, less power consumption, and lower fault ratio.

Fully legacy reuse helps operators to reduce CAPEX and civil works. During swapping, existing sites or associated facilities including feeder & antennas system, power supply, transmission, base frame etc can be fully reused.

Automatic professional network planning & optimizing and swap tools shorten network construction dramatically. Throughout the whole network construction, a set of powerful whole life-cycle performance-guaranteed platform and categorized professional tools developed to speed up network deployment. These include below platforms and tools but is not limited to following:
GENEX platform: includes categorized NP&NO tools that enable accurate and fast network planning and network optimizing.
GPAC (Global Performance Analysis Centre): performance aid tool, which can automatically monitor and collect all parameters related performance and dynamically generate operation suggestion in advance.
Embedded Signalling Tool: fast locate the cause of failure without extra expensive testing instruments, features OPEX reduction and 50%+ efficiency promoted.
Auto TCO estimate tool: the easiest and high efficiency way to control TCO with less technical requirements and trainings to engineer

Based on 100% key parameters inheritance, network planning, propagation correction, data configuration, prediction of traffic, performance stimulation, and fast trouble shooting can be executed automatically. The shortest service launch term can be achieved in increasingly fierce competitive environment, which makes operators to be preferential in market.

Quality Voice & Differentiated Services Solution

Huawei EnerG GSM solution possesses the capabilities of offering excellent voice quality and a great diversity of services that enables operators more choices.

In terms of voice, it is realized on an all-IP platform based BSC6000 that features high integration, huge capacity (support up to 2048TRXs, 1024TRXs/cabinet), lower power consumption, optical transmission, and support for smooth evolution. Various enhanced voice and interference cancelling technologies such as AMR, TFO (Tandem Free Operation), AEC (Acoustic Echo Cancel), ALC (Automatic Level Control), ANC (Automatic Noise Restrain), and ICC, are adopted by BSC6000. These not only improve the utilization ratio of radio frequency spectrum resource and decrease difficulty of sites acquisition, but also sharply reduce radio interference and the number of handovers according to unlimited cell splitting. Owning to the effective promotion on service quality, it benefits operators by extending call time and attracting more new subscribers.

For services, Huawei EnerG GSM solution targets to provide differentiated experiences to customers so as to stimulate services being used.

GPRS/EDGE is used to fulfil the requirements of high speed data transmission based on GSM network.

eMLPP + HR, layered service allocation mechanism ensures channel assignment based on predefined priority. Typically, FR channel should be assigned to high-priority users preferentially and HR channel for low-priority users, and preemption enabled for high-priority users during perk time. High-priority users' perception can be improved, meanwhile, low-priority users' communication can be guaranteed. Both customer satisfaction and traffic load can be retained.

CRBT (Color Ring Back Tone) enables subscriber with individual experiences and fun.

GSM-Talkie is a brand new value-added service was first introduced to GSM network by Huawei. This service can be realized based on GSM network. It target group users particularly from governments and enterprises.

LCS (Location Service) provides subscribers with various value-added services.

Future-oriented Evolution Solution

World Wide Application, Serving Over 120 Million Subscribers