Planning Tool Improves Accuracy of WiMAX Network Proposals

05 May 2007

ProVision Communications has released an enhanced version of its WiMAX network site optimisation tool ProSite that will bring significant cost benefits to service providers and WiMAX equipment vendors. The tool enables WiMAX networks to be much more accurately planned, potentially resulting in a dramatic reduction in the number of base stations required.

“This has obvious competitive benefits to WiMAX vendors when bidding on large contracts by reducing their base station costs by as much as 20%, and at the same time lowers contract risk by increasing confidence in the precise number and location of base stations needing to be deployed” said Dr. Nicolas Lodge, CEO of ProVision Communications.

In using this enhanced optimisation tool the network planner works from an initial list of sites known to be available to achieve a fully optimised network design; this avoids theoretical solutions containing unobtainable sites. The new ProSite optimisation tool considers both technical and financial data to select the minimum and lowest cost subset of sites that meet a particular user defined coverage and/or capacity requirement. The user-supplied list of possible sites can contain existing sites which must be included in the final optimised solution. Hence ProSite can assist in planning the growth of an existing network as well as plan for an entirely new network. Financial costs (such as equipment rental and operating costs) are considered alongside technical data (e.g. sector transmit powers, total capacity, frequency assignment etc.) for each site. ProSite allows a user-specified frequency plan for coverage and capacity optimisation. Subscriber locations can be loaded from a file or manually specified using the supplied GUI. The network planner can specify the requested traffic level (data rates) for subscribers, as well as the unit charge for the traffic type (i.e. cost per Mb of traffic). This enables ProSite to estimate the potential revenue for each optimised solution. Coverage and capacity constraints are specified using user-defined link quality metrics. The system offers a ranked list of solutions, and allows ranking based on various considerations e.g. coverage percentage, total number of sites, total cost, projected revenue, etc.

ProSite works in conjunction with ProPhecy, the world-leading WiMAX propagation planning toolset developed by ProVision Communications. This new enhanced version of ProSite can also be used with third party prediction data derived from other planning systems to provide similar benefits.

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