September 2021

How do you solve a problem that you don’t know exists? Mobile operators face this challenge every day, needing to identify and fix network issues quickly before they begin to substantially impact subscriber's experience. Historically, operators have needed to rely heavily on their own internal monitoring systems to look for misconfiguration or hardware/software issues within the network. However, while these monitoring systems can detect single or multiple issues within the network, they are frequently blind to impacts to end-to-end customer experience.

A network routing configuration, for example, may appear to be fine and within acceptable parameters, but could be causing drops in user experience that go undetected until complaints start to come in - and subscribers consider switching to competitor networks.

Cutting edge new Anomaly Detection systems are starting to be tested and implemented by operators at the forefront of innovation, such as Vodafone and Nokia's deployment that identifies patterns of change to allow Vodafone to proactively address issues before they impact the customer.

Tutela’s anomaly detection solution “Tutela Alerts” powered by technology from Outlier.ai also solves these challenges by using artificial intelligence to constantly monitor Tutela’s massive user experience data streams, crowdsourced from hundreds of millions of handsets globally. The platform proactively and automatically identifies data changes which are potentially impacting user experience and then generates alerts which are delivered via email and in an interactive news feed. Mobile operators are alerted to potential issues and are able to take action to further investigate and resolve them, before performance issues continue for too long. 

Tutela Alerts detected an unexpected drop in download speeds

Tutela Alerts recently identified a sharp decrease of download speed in Indonesia - as much as 30% in some areas. Although download speeds vary on an hourly and daily basis as network demands shift up and down, this drop was outside of the projected range and triggered an alert.

Intelligent alerts, like this one, are delivered in a daily and weekly feed, and give operators a new set of tools to monitor their subscriber’s experience.

An investigation followed

Using Tutela Explorer, Telkomsel was able to dive deeper into the data to discover exactly where and why this issue occurred.

• Telkomsel’s Artha Abimanyu, Manager of Service Quality Assurance Jawa Barat, quickly isolated the issue in that region through daily analysis of his regional performance insights 
• Looking at the distribution of download tests over time quickly revealed that the issue started on June 3rd and had resulted in a change in the distribution of download speeds resulting in a significant drop in the average download speed performance received by users in this area
• Continuing his investigation, Artha Abimanyu was then able to confirm this against Telkomsel’s network change logs and confirmed the source of the change as ongoing network optimization, quickly identifying the unexpected impact of internal changes on end-user experience

Before the change: Download throughput performance shown as green (good) in most locations surrounding the city of Bandung.

Download speed performance (green = good; red = bad)

After the change: download performance dropped below acceptable levels in and around Bandung.

Download speed performance (green = good; red = bad)

The issue was found & fixed

Following the analysis, Telkomsel were able to fix the issue and return download throughput to normal levels. In total, the problem had been identified, diagnosed and resolved in under 2 weeks. For many mobile operators, changes like this can be left unnoticed for months.

Gunawan Adhy, Manager of Service and Experience Measurement at Telkomsel, commented: “At Telkomsel we are investing heavily in the best technologies to enable us to consistently deliver the best mobile experience in Indonesia for our customers. In collaboration with our own internal monitoring systems, Tutela’s platform enables us to isolate issues and improvement opportunities quickly, allowing us to take decisive action to improve network experience for our users.” 

Get in touch today to see how you can proactively identify network issues and discover insights for your region.