The last couple of days, I together with some +100 professionals from the industry have participated in the 2nd annual conference on Self Organizing Networks, SON, at the Le Meridien Hotel in London.
To my great surprise, I realized how far ahead we sometimes are in Sweden in the area of wireless. While operators from different parts of the world still relies on their HSPA networks and have an ambition to start rolling out LTE some day in the future, our Swedish operator Tele2 stands up and talks about their LTE network that has been live for almost a year and their own home built SON system that they have been using for allmost a decade?
When Tele2 together with Telia started their joint venture SUNAB, they also took on the task of rolling out more than 6000 3G base stations in less than 3 years. I.e. ~10 new BTS per day. For Tele2, with a fraction of staff compared to Telia, the only possibility for them to be able to accomplish their part of this magnificent task was to highly automate the network optimization. This was also done with the help of the small, highly competent and innovative consulting company Canaima Communications (http://www.canaima.se/). Today, Tele2 possesses a tool for SON that handles multi RAT and multi vendors in a shared network. It automatically generates Neighbor Lists for 2G, 3G and 4G, for Partner MVNO:s, and integrates with eight networks.
Was there anything else of importance revealed at the conference? Well, technically nothing that was presented was close to Tele2/Canaima – within “light years”!
On the other hand, it was interesting to hear the respective vendors views of the future: Whereas Ericsson looks forward to a world of networks built on multiple technologies and by multiple vendors, Huawei looked forward to a different world order:
– “For Huawei multiple vendor solutions is no priority”, is a quote to think about…
Umm, Huawei wants to have the whole ice cream to themselves?
or that they don’t have the competence to support multi-vendor solutions…