Agilent unveils RMS for mobile operators

Rahul Gupta

MUMBAI: With falling airtime tariffs, increasing competition and saturating customer base, globally mobile operators are moving from volume-and-value based marketing strategies alone to service quality, which has become the prime differentiator these days. To enhance the quality of service, Agilent is going to launch its Remote Monitoring System (RMS) to cater to the fault detection and maintenance requirement of service providers.

Arif Rizvi, Market Segment Manager, Agilent Asia said, "In present circumstances, the service providers spend a lot of time and money in manual drive test methods as amongst the only few methods by which engineers are sent in different parts of the city to detect the faults and correct them. Hence, it takes days to get the fault detected, analyzed and rectified. With the deployment of RMS, service providers and engineers will get rid of all this headache."

The initial investment for deployment of this technology ranges from $ 400,000 to $ 2 million. The company claimed that service providers would start getting Returns on Investment (ROI) within a year of deployment of this technology. The company is expecting to get it deployed in at least three GSM networks within six months.

RMS has been successfully tried on companies like AT&T in the US and is now being launched in India. The company claimed that it would help the service providers by enabling them to increase their work force efficiency up to 60 percent by reducing the number of manual tests. It would also help them in reducing operating expenses by autonomously collecting drive test data.

Agilent Technologies’ RMS enables wireless service managers to manage, expand and deploy wireless networks without increasing workloads or adding resources. The system works on a remote system processing by allowing access to the necessary RF performance data to solve problems through a simple web browser.

Agilent Technologies offers test and measurement solutions to the communications, electronics and life sciences markets. Agilent recently reported 39 percent market share in the communications market and over 80 percent of mobile handsets across the globe are tested on Agilent equipment.