GPRS OSS Solutions

Agilent Technologies introduced three innovative operations support system (OSS) solutions that collect and analyze GPRS and GSM signaling data to enable wireless service providers to better serve their subscribers by proactively managing their GPRS services.

The new solutions, part of Agilent's wireless data offering, solve critical operations and business challenges, such as identifying problems in real time; locating and assessing network and service outages; and understanding subscribers' acceptance of new GPRS services; as well as monitoring the availability and performance of those services. These OSSs enable service providers to leverage data from signaling technologies to deliver an end-to-end view of network and service usage.

The three solutions announced at TeleManagement World include the Agilent OSS Data Mining Toolkit, the Agilent OSS GPRS Session Trace and the new Agilent acceSS7 high-density probe hardware.

Agilent OSS Data Mining Toolkit

The Agilent OSS Data Mining Toolkit is a scalable and flexible historical analysis and reporting tool that manipulates millions of call and transaction detail records per day to provide a comprehensive and intelligent view of network and service usage. It allows marketing, network operations and other groups responsible for the success of GPRS services to capture signaling data into a single database and run distilled reports for offline analysis. With the cost of ownership split across multiple departments, each group is armed with real usage intelligence to ensure the delivery of high-quality GPRS services while performing under operating expenditure constraints. The flexibility of the Data Mining Toolkit enables users to rapidly define and adapt customized reports, a key requirement for new services -- where the subscriber needs may not be predictable. Data Mining Toolkit is a scalable solution that provides analysis of existing GPRS services and information to help define, trial and launch new GPRS services.

Agilent OSS GPRS Session Trace

The Agilent OSS GPRS Session Trace is a simplified, real-time and historical tracking tool that provides an intuitive view of a subscriber's GPRS session for proactive and reactive faultfinding. It enables the network operations group to troubleshoot GPRS sessions in real-time or react to past events when reported by subscribers. When used with the Agilent OSS acceSS7 Call Trace and Protocol Analysis applications, network operations have information from all GPRS and GSM signaling interfaces, which provides a complete view of the subscriber activity for quick fault location and resolution.

New Agilent acceSS7 Hardware

The new acceSS7 high-density probe hardware is a small footprint, high-performance, multi-technology signaling data acquisition platform for GPRS network and service assurance applications. It complements the current acceSS7 probe hardware, which set the benchmark for signaling data capture. The hardware simplifies the collection of user and signaling data from GSM, GPRS, IP and high-speed technologies to monitor a user's GPRS session. Typically this would require the deployment of a large, complex system with multiple probes on each type of link monitored, feeding separate hardware racks. With the new Agilent solution, wireless service providers can collect, store and process data from all links in the same hardware platform. This reduces the footprint and cost of implementation and provides support for future interfaces.