ZTE’s CEA Service Helps Guangzhou Mobile Enhance Service Quality

With the evolution of mobile broadband technologies, boom in internet services, and boom in intelligent terminals, Chinese operators are facing fierce competition to expand their mobile broadband user base.

Providing customers with differentiated, personalized, high-quality mobile internet services gives operators a core advantage. It is also a major way to increase revenue and user loyalty. Therefore, Guangzhou Mobile introduced ZTE’s customer experience assurance (CEA) services to evaluate service performance, troubleshoot potential problems, and develop optimization solutions. This helps Guangzhou Mobile improve service quality according to customer experience.

Guangzhou Mobile is located in a front-line city for reforms and opening up in China and has always been encouraged to adopt new technologies. Guangzhou Mobile selects RNC10 that is in a major coverage area and with large service traffic as a pilot site, for which ZTE provides CEA services.

In order to improve service quality, user experience, and customer satisfaction, ZTE customized a series of service solutions for Guangzhou Mobile. These solutions include TCP connection performance analysis and HTTP service performance analysis to analyze the quality of current mainstream services.

TCP Connection Performance Analysis to Enhance User Perception of Access

The analysis shows that the TCP connection success rate of Guangzhou Mobile was as low as about 70% and seriously affected service access performance (Fig. 1). Generally, the normal value is 92–93%, so the success rate of Guangzhou Mobile had to be increased by about 23%. This issue involves the coverage or interference on the wireless side.

The delay for TCP connection is 540 ms, and it is even longer on the wireless side. Therefore, the delay needed to be shortened on the upstream, wireless sides, and in TOP cells.

In traditional network management systems, TCP connection KPIs are poor, and we cannot tell whether the problem lies with wired part or wireless part. To address this issue, CEA is introduced to break down the overall connection process, find the root causes, and solve problems rapidly.

HTTP Service Performance Analysis to Enhance User Perception of Integrity

After analyzing HTTP services thoroughly, we discovered that the success rate of DNS query was relative low, and the GET response delay was fairly long (Fig. 2). After further investigation, we found that DNS query failed due to defaulting or invalid users. The GET response delay depends mainly on the CMWAP channel. However, the GET response delay of CMWAP channel is six times greater than that of the CMNET channel. Therefore, the performance of CMWAP channel needed to be further improved.

The DNS query success rate is only a representation. Based on the industry-leading clustering algorithms, the CEA service pinpoints problems by analyzing the related network elements of a faulty network element and then solves the faulty APN efficiently. By doing this, the CEA service increases the overall success rate of DNS query and guarantees network quality.

Web Browsing Service Performance Analysis to Enhance User Perception of Usage

After analyzing the download rate of web browsing services, we discovered that approximately two-thirds of users had good perception, about one-third of users had fair or poor perception, and 16% of users had very poor perception.

Results of download rate analysis showed that perception of the download rate in 30% of the cells was fair and that in 1.7% of the cells was poor. For the cells with fair or poor user perception, which are possibly caused by large number of users, high load, or limited coverage, the download rate needs to be increased through expansion or coverage optimization.

Service usage patterns cannot be obtained by conventional means. Thanks to its accurate business models and in-depth understanding of network problems, ZTE’s CEA service not only makes user behavior visible but also defines root causes rapidly, troubleshoots potential network problems, and makes suggestions for corrective measures.