As mobile subscriber growth continues, one challenge will remain – spectrum limitations will be a potential consideration in certain areas and perhaps across a carrier’s footprint. This is where Astella comes in, the company helps reduce bottlenecks in mobile networks – specifically the radio frequencies, allowing better customer experience. Rajesh Sharma, President of Global Sales & Customer Operations spent some time explaining how his company’s tools can determine where the subscriber is, what they are doing and what their experience is. He beleives this is how his company differs from other players which give you broader measures of network quality.

The company recently acquired Ingenia Telcom, a Spain-based company delivering probleless-RAN monitoring. He beleives this compliments their current products as they now can provide geolocation solutions. Moreover, this means the combined company has 2,000 man-years of deep radio-optimization experience.

The company also provides SON-monitoring solutions allowing these self-optimized networks to become more effectively optimized. These specialized tools will allow carriers to better address requirements in a timely way. For example when you have multiple radio layers such as femto, pico and radio access in a building, a SON allows better resource utilization. Ingenia helps manage these SONs to maximize their effectiveness.

In a demo, he showed me how you can look at clients as a whole based on company and drill down to see how their quality is overall and over time. You can drill down to cell sites to see how they are performing in a given location. A carrier can also see what services are being consumed by a particular group. Marketing can use this information to determine how the usage patterns are changing and determine if the customer may be better off with a different plan.

Cariers can also determine which handsets are performing better than others and you can see trending information over time.

Some of the hot areas of growth right now are Europe and emerging markets. He beleives the growth is driven by increased smartphone penetration and also, more 3G and 4G networks being rolled out.

He says having a fine-tuned radio network is key to having a solid network with minimal limitations. He continued by saying radio is an art not a science meaning you learn from experience. His company has done more than five thousand audits giving them great experience in the market he explained.

The bottom line is the company is showing how carriers can see how their customers are experiancing their services. This is a big leap from a survey-based approach to network quality. “This is a more factual-based solution marketing teams can use,” said Sharma.

Another differentiator the company touts is radio+core support across 2G-4G networks for marketing andtechnical teams, allowing a single solution to help them collaborate more effectively.

Rajesh closed by repeating how important it is for carriers to get accss to this information and how it is so much better than real-time surveys. For example, he mentioned that giving marketing access to how many roaming attempts were blocked by a specific operator could allow marketing to gain insight as to how much more revenue could be generated via a proper roaming agreement.

Astellia thinks as it educates its market more effectively, more carriers will not only use its solutions but utilize them to bring their disparate departments together as well.