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It happens all the time: equipment in a Telecoms network stops reporting traffic statistics. It’s often a problem, though not always the one you think.

The problem can be caused by a failing component somewhere along the data delivery path. You might think that’s the problem.

More likely, the device is under excessive load, and it stopped reporting stats to dedicate all its processing power to providing service.

Of course, it is up to you to figure out which it is. Fault Management systems might help by alerting you to the failing component. But if the issue is excessive load, the solution lies on a different path.

Many telecoms components are designed to provide service as their number one priority over all others. When that priority is threatened, low-priority tasks are discontinued. From the perspective of the equipment, we say it’s designed to shed low-priority load when under stress.

Stress is often caused by an anomalously high load, or by a capacity shortfall. An anomalous load could be triggered by a natural disaster, weather, a civil disturbance, or anything where large numbers of people begin using the network at the same time.

A capacity shortfall means you best start preparing a Capital budget request to fund a capacity augment.

But those aren’t the problems I wanted to discuss. I want to discuss how you can design your Excel Dashboards and recurring reports to handle errors and data dropouts. The types of data dropouts I described above happen all the time. Having an Error Correction strategy built-in will save you tons of time and avoid long explanations. Continue reading “Excel Telecom Tricks – Error Correction”

Here’s a problem I’ll bet you struggle with all the time.  You’ve got sites in your network with problems.  High handover failures, high dropped calls, other failing KPIs.  It might include sites on the edge of a coverage area with no handover neighbors, or sites which are close to lakes and other bodies of water, where RF skip from distant sites is a problem, or maybe sites with dodgy microwave backhaul links. There are tons of situations on a mobile network which can cause these persistent, hard-to-fix problems.

The image shows a list of “Top 10” sites with high dropped call rates.  On the left, is the current list.  This is before exclusion has been applied.

On the right is the list after the troublesome sites have been excluded.  Now all the sites on the list are problems that the team can actually solve.

If your cluster or network has enough of these problematic sites, then the awful statistics they produce can clutter your dashboards and recurring reports, masking other problems which could be fixed and really should. If your reports display a “Top 10” worst-performing sites, these known, unfixable problems will always appear, hiding other problems that you could be fixing.

I’ve seen many teams manually remove these sites from each report. This improves the usefulness of the reports by hiding problems which cannot be fixed. But manually removing these sites is a laborious and time-consuming manual process. It’s a tremendous waste of time. Continue reading “Excel Telecom Tricks – Exclusion”

An objective common to almost every Telecoms activity you’ll do in your career is to share your work with others. Sharing in this sense can take many forms:

• Document steps taken.
• Identify a problem.
• Teach a task to others.
• Reveal a hidden truth.
• Propose another plan.
• Brainstorm fiercely.

The context for each of these tasks is Telecoms. But the actual process might seem only distantly related to the courses you took and theories they taught. Yet it is this process of data collection, manipulation, analysis, and, most importantly, presentation and sharing, which is at the very core of Telecoms.

Communicating your ideas so that others can understand them is a huge challenge. The technological skills and comprehension of your audience can be so unpredictable. Their goals and objectives may differ wildly from your own. So to achieve your goals and objectives, it’s up to you to communicate them in a way which is suitable for your audience.

There are entire courses taught on data presentation and visualization. It’s a big topic with lots of angles. In this article, I’ll discuss a very narrow technique from the field. It’s called “normalization”. Normalization is a way to present data so that it’s meaning or implications are more clear. I’ll show you several approaches for using Excel to normalize your data. Continue reading “Excel Telecom Tricks – Normalization”

We make lots of reports in Telecoms.  Telecoms seems to be built on reports. Reports and acronyms.  Reports for every piece of equipment, for every circuit, for every service, for every product.  We make reports for forecasting, budgeting, both CapEx and OpEx, analyses, models.  Tons of reports.  Reports of all the reports.

One of the most common types of a report in Telecoms is a seasonality report.  What is Seasonality?

It’s easy to find examples of seasonality. Here are some:

• The traffic Busy Hour is an example of daily seasonality.  A graph of traffic load looks pretty much the same day by day.
• Weekend data traffic might be higher than weekdays because people have more time to stream movies.  This is weekly seasonality
• Government or military employees might cause revenue seasonality by buying more phones and prepaid service when they get paid on the 1st and 15th every month.  This is monthly seasonality
• Some US carriers experience a boom in Smartphone sales in March-April-May when people receive their government tax refund.  That’s a form of yearly seasonality.

Let’s explore seasonality by taking a closer look at a Busy Hour report. Continue reading “Excel Telecom Tricks – Seasonality”

With any tool you use frequently to solve many problems, there’s sure to be lots of tricks and shortcuts that can make your job so much easier.  Microsoft Excel is one of those tools for Telecoms, and there certainly are tricks and shortcuts.  Learning them will help you become more proficient with Excel, and give you a pocketful of shortcuts for doing real work quickly.

This will do more than simply save your time.  It allows you to derive insights and identify opportunities.  You can actually start to understand what the data mean.

A common problem in Telecoms is that machine-generated raw data isn’t in the format you want.  Or maybe there is data missing which is required to complete your analysis.

In this article, I’ll show you a technique I call Synthetic Fields.  Synthetic fields allow you to modify data, or add data related to the raw data.  Often Synthetic Fields are used to provide additional ways for Pivot Tables to summarize your data.  This helps when you want to automate your Dashboards and recurring reports. Continue reading “Excel Telecom Tricks – Synthetic Fields”