Tool driven system – approaching in Telecom industry

Technology is making us idle & less prone to work – I stated this earlier already, now again facing the most obvious cases out of it in telecom sector. Earlier people really tried hard to make something manually, then one by one testing its each segments, then finally experiencing that. But this age is not for testing or building something manually. Yes, in my school days, I rarely found any tech blogs / solution forum, there were lots of problems. But now days , everything is ready made- if you’re trying to make a blog or a community, everything is template ready, you just need to hit a click – so called “One click installation. ” I remember when it was my ist year of college days I wrote lots of pages of codes for one static website for my band, but the outcome was cool & beautiful.

In Telecom industry the shadow is approaching silently. I’m experiencing lots of scenarios in Reliance JIO, those are application driven, where manual scenes are very slowly but steadily being wiped out. In drive tests, people were using RF tools installed in laptop with vehicle. This was the fundamental package since I’ve learned about Telecom industry in India. RF Engineer, rigger, drier of cab altogether represent a team- where ever there are issues, they’re present to fix issues. RF plots were about to record from a decently driven car , running around 20 Km/hr. RF engineer (Drive Test Engineer) is dedicate mapped with car for these activities – for each second, for each signal’s good / bad justification was his responsibility. Then taking out exports of the plots, then analysis of plots & making reports. so for every activity being an RF engineer you should be a technical expert. For optimization cases also there are manual methods. If sometimes, there are issues in antennas, or sites, rigger is about to mount tower & would do changes accordingly.

But scenes are changing everyday, these things gradually are vanishing dramatically – like in Reliance JIO, RF engineers don’t use vehicle or laptop for drive test purpose. They usually drive with bikes ( two wheelers) with mobile tools (XCal). You only need to worry about mobile charge, don’t use your brain technically. Put the phone in pocket & run xcal in some particular mode & concentrate on your biking. Thats all of Drive tests. Now coming into, post processing cases, after completing drive, dont waste time in exporting. A direct upload process would be initiated after prompting & report will be generated by server automatically. No manual input, no error check, no analysis. For optimization cases, Reliance JIO uses RET (Remote Electrical Tilt) which are parametric, can be optimized remotely sitting in a room, need not to run to the field or site.

So in previous scenario for manual methods , there were lots of scopes where you may posses a chance of 1% to be a genius by R&D – ing with the technical glitches. But due to tool driven cases ( second case) luckily or bad luckily you’re basically becoming a dumb where you’re working something without knowing any technical parameters, any issues, solutions. Though RET is a smart solution I must say, for some minor parametric change you can save time rather than rushing to site.

Slowly, Everything is becoming tool driven – clearing enodeB alarms, changing network KPIs in android app, performing drive tests with Drones etc. Western countries are one step ahead than us. But everything should not be tool driven, as I discussed. The knowledge & capacity of human brains to rationalize things must not get rusted without use.