Today, TELUS Mobility is one of the largest wireless carriers in Canada, providing more than three million clients with a full suite of wireless voice, Internet and data services through two state-of-the-art and distinct digital wireless networks: PCS and Mike. TELUS Mobility is the wireless telecommunications arm of TELUS Corporation, the second-largest telecom company in Canada and the leader in the Western Canadian market. Needing integrated network operations The merged network infrastructure technologies include Nortel CDMA, Nortel AMPS, Lucent CDMA, Motorola iDEN, CDPD, Paging and Autotel. Part of the network operations integration needed to occur at the national fault management level because both companies had different processes and software solutions in place at the time of the acquisition. Clearnet had HP OpenView Element Management Framework (OEMF) and TELUS Mobility had various solutions in the West, including the outsourcing of surveillance to the TELUS landline NOC, after-hours which used TONICS software. Rob Tilley, Director of Network Operational Support Systems for TELUS Mobility, elaborated, “Two telecommunications companies had merged to become a national wireless provider. They had very diverse operational environments, with multiple management solutions in place. Our goal was to simplify this environment and establish comprehensive national operational control as swiftly as possible.” Wayne Burke, Manager of Network Operational Support Systems for TELUS Mobility, reflected, “In the legacy environment, we didn’t have a single unified environment to receive alarms. Part-time operators had to keep checking different operational views, so if they didn’t look at one for a few hours, there could be a delay in problem resolution.” HP delivers a national surveillance system Burke noted, “Shortly after our deadline for the RFP, HP officially merged with Compaq, so we permitted it to resubmit a proposal based upon its rationalized operations software portfolio. The new submission recommended the HP OpenView Telecommunication Management Information Platform (TeMIP.)” TeMIP is the HP OpenView product specifically tailored for telecommunications network and service management. It integrates with HP OpenView Operations and HP OpenView Network Node Manager, both of which TELUS Mobolity already had in its operations environment, to offer a single interface into telecom, IP and Information Technology infrastructures. For flexible connectivity, TeMIP offers a library of access modules for equipment and management interfaces to enable diverse technologies to be supported and managed, and connectivity to other Operations Support Systems (OSS) applications from HP and leading ISVs.
HP consultants visited TELUS Mobility and installed a demonstration version of HP OpenView TeMIP, permitting the evaluation team to experience the full product functionality on its own network. Burke noted, “The demonstration was very positive and it was impressive to see how well HP OpenView TeMIP performed on our own data.” Tilley agreed, “When we rated the product against the other contenders it came out with a very high compliance rating of 94 percent against our requirements list. For this reason we selected HP OpenView TeMIP as our national fault management system. We also felt comfortable choosing HP because it is a very stable company, and a major player in our industry and TeMIP provides integration with other key telecom ISVs.” In addition to purchasing HP OpenView TeMIP for the production infrastructure, TELUS Mobility also purchased a comprehensive development environment. Tilley explained, “We wanted to be in the driver’s seat and able to develop interfaces to TeMIP ourselves. We have a very talented development staff and robust testing environment, so we purchased every available HP toolkit to give us maximum flexibility.” Consulting and implementation assistance from HP TELUS Mobility needed different access modules to permit TeMIP to comprehensively interface with all of the elements within its network. Although TeMIP has a comprehensive library of access modules, TELUS Mobility needed a number of specialized interfaces to be custom written. Burke noted, “The development of these modules was critical. The consultants from HP had to work closely with us to get them to exactly meet our needs. I was impressed with how well the HP experts accomplished this.” The presentation layer of TeMIP is really a set of views that provides operators with network and service visibility at a national level. TELUS Mobility also needed the HP consultants to fine tune the displays to align tightly with the company’s unique requirements. To automate management tasks based upon predefined rules, TELUS Mobility makes use of TeMIP Expert. TeMIP Expert is a rule-based module that complements and enhances TeMIP’s built-in filtering and correlation capabilities. Burke explained, “It allows us to develop and implement rules to help aggregate some of the network data. We can take multiple alarms and roll them up into one consolidated request. For example, if the power went out at a site we immediately receive lots of major, component-level power outage alarms and, by setting up a rule, we can roll them up into one bigger critical alarm to indicate the whole cell site has lost power.” Improved operations and reduced costs Today, the systems are processing four million lines of raw alarm data per day, equating to 50,000 actual alarms, which are aggregated to 2,500 unique alarmsnationwide that are presented to the NOC. Burke said, “TeMIP has better correlation capabilities than we had with our legacy software. When we receive a lot of alarms in a short period of time, we can quickly connect them with network events and understand what is actually happening. It is very useful and saves a lot of time for our NOC staff.” Burke added, “As we develop more rules in TeMIP Expert, our operators will see even greater reductions in alarm data, thereby presenting more meaningful event information. In addition – to simplify interpretation – we plan to display alarm data on network maps.” Burke noted, “We’ve lowered our operational costs by enabling two network operations centres to manage the entire network via HP OpenView TeMIP. Today, the NOC staff is focused on one solution instead of managing many. The national processes have lead to efficiencies and consistency of support.” “The consultants from HP are experts in their field, they possess excellent customer focus and they addressed our needs in a timely manner. The implementation of HP OpenView TeMIP was a huge contributor to successfully meeting our national network surveillance goals. The Network Operations Centres (NOCs) efficiently and effectively perform fault management for the entire TELUS Mobility network infrastructure. This in turn enables us to deliver even higher levels of network availability while contributing to reducing our operational costs. We have implemented common national metrics and are able to sustain a more consistent environment – increasing quality of service. HP has delivered a solution that gives us the flexibility and agility to support the dynamic lifecycle requirements of the NOC environment,” concluded Tilley. At a glance • Company: TELUS Mobility
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