Astellia interviewed Xavier Pavoux, Radio Engineering Manager at Bouygues Telecom, on their partnership with Astellia for radio optimization.
What is your role within Bouygues Telecom?
I am working in the Operations & Deployment department within the Network Division of Bouygues Telecom. The country is divided into 3 regions: I am responsible for mobile radio engineering including the conception, dimensioning and the Quality of Service of the 2G, 3G and 4G networks for the Ile de France region. I translate the technical strategy into actions on the field, taking into account capacity requirements and new technology evolutions. I am backed-up by a team of 25 engineers who ensure the operational efficiency and the optimization of the network within the region.
You were looking to improve even further the QoS of Paris inner city and inner suburbs?
Indeed, we called upon EXFO to help us with this strategic mission to perform in-depth radio optimization campaigns. Working with EXFO allowed us to advance quickly, benchmark our internal tools and most importantly add geolocation information which our current tools do not provide.
EXFO’s radio optimization activities focused on the detection of, among others, crossed sectors. We corrected already 80% of the detected errors; the other 20% are still under investigation. EXFO also provided a list of PSC clashes and we could clearly see an improvement in QoS after we implemented corrective actions.
EXFO’s geolocation information illustrates network coverage, quality and traffic. What is of interest to us is the vision per carrier of our 3G network. It allows us to see immediately where we have a margin of coverage improvement on the second or third carrier for instance.
What is great is as the investigations evolved, new cases were detected. According to me we haven’t exploited the full potential of the geolocation maps yet.
What are the next steps?
We are continually working to provide the best experience to our customers. With Astellia we have seen important improvements in our network and Parisians now clearly benefit from even better services. As a next step, we will work together to enhance the performance and reliability of our 4G network in the Paris area. And we will certainly explore the benefits for the other regions as well.
