Europe : AIRCOM International has announced that BTC Bulgaria is now the third Bulgarian Mobile Network Operator to be using network engineering tools from the ENTERPRISE suite.

Inset shows a screenshot using RANOPT.

Driving forward their EDGE roll-out in April this year, BTC has purchased a combination of ASSET3G Radio Planning software, ADVANTAGE Automatic Cell Planning software and RANOPT Post-Processing and Analysis software.

“By using these 3 integrated tools, BTC is expected to be able to significantly improve efficiency of planning and optimisation processes and therefore reduce time-to-market of new services”, Milcho Angelov of ASI Company, AIRCOM’s partner in Bulgaria, says. “It is the quickest and most reliable planning and optimisation solution available to Operators today. Moreover it is a future-proof investment as it offers a seamless upgrade to 3G planning and optimisation”.

ASSET3G is without a doubt the best established Radio Planning solution in the market, with over 150 customers using the tool worldwide. The tool is fully multi-technology capable, allowing Operators to not only use just one tool for all 2G, 2.5G and 3G planning, but also provide unrivalled possibilities for planning co-located sites, reducing the number of new base stations needed to be built.

ADVANTAGE is directly integrated with ASSET3G, providing automatic RF optimisation of the initial RAN planning. ADVANTAGE cuts out the time-consuming manual optimisation and trial-and-error drive testing that has previously been used by Operators, saving an estimated 20% of time. Moreover, because of the more detailed and reliable optimisation by ADVANTAGE, Operators can reduce the number the base stations originally needed by about 10%.

RANOPT is a feature rich 2G, 2.5G and 3G drive test post processing tool, which automates KPI report generation and auto fault identification. Its integration into the Planning environment allows optimisation engineers to see the planning features and to use the planning tool to see what effects the changes would have before they are actually implemented, thus reducing more costly drive testing.

For more information about ASSET3G, ADVANTAGE and RANOPT, visit the AIRCOM stand at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, 14-17 February 2005, Hall 2, stand D46.