Ethio Telecom Built an End-to-End Network O&M Management System

The African Union is headquartered in Ethiopia, the political center and aviation hub of Africa. As the sole telecom operator in Ethiopia, Ethio Telecom (ET) is operating a full portfolio of wireless, fixed-line and ISP services. It supports the annual Assembly of the African Union with reliable telecom equipment and services. In recent years, the Ethiopian economy has developed rapidly, and the Ethiopian government has started constructing highways and urban light railway on a large scale. The telecom industry, as a national important foundation industry, has developed considerably as well. Nowadays, more and more Ethiopian are using apps on smartphones, such as Facebook, WeChat, and Whatsup, to communicate with others and enjoy the social life of pleasure.
ET has wireless 2G, 3G and CDMA networks. Its five-year plan, which commenced in 2014, emphasizes the project to cover the capital city with 4G networks and the whole country with 3G networks. To achieve this goal, ET selected ZTE, Ericsson, and Huawei to undertake its network capacity expansion project. However, a large amount of equipment and high complexity of services and networks posed a huge challenge to the O&M of ET.
To overcome this challenge, in the course of project implementation, ZTE provided end-to-end wireless, core network, transmission, and fixed-network equipment to ET. In addition, ZTE constructed the National Network Operation Center (NNOC), which is the central system for the O&M of the entire network. The NNOC, which owned by ET, is located at the Ethiopian Ministry of Defense building. It provides ET's end-to-end network with intelligent, efficient, and convenient O&M solutions.

Precise Management of Complicated Networks

The Ethiopian NNOC system monitors all ZTE, Ericsson and Huawei networks in real time and from end to end. It analyzes the network connections and topology carefully to spot key information from massive alarms. By doing so, network maintenance can be made more efficient.
The complex networks of  ET comprises the previous, 2G mobile and fixed network products, the newly implemented LTE, 3G, microwave, optical transmission, data communications, fixed network, VAS, energy infrastructure, and environment monitoring products from different suppliers. However, every product has its own management system, so there are more than 50 independent systems all together.
To address the management issues of complex networks, ET chose ZTE's NetNumenTM UNMS. It has been deployed in the NNOC. The huge number of independent network management systems is connected to NetNumenTM UNMS for information integration and resource management, thus centralized handling and managing of mass data, including the alarms, performance indicators, and assets of different manufacturers and professions.
Moreover, the unified data processing platform analyzes mass data according to multidimensional information, such as NEs, topology and end-to-end hierarchical relations, to intelligently identify key alarms. Through alarm merging and root failure analysis algorithm, the NNOC system identifies less than 600 key alarms from a collection of 300,000 and then dispatches lists automatically. Therefore, NNOC O&M engineers only need to handle key alarms for accurate and efficient management.

Process Optimization

ET has long suffered from isolated organizations, decentralized management, and long decision-making processes. With professional consulting services and world-class platform tools, ZTE helped ET streamline its internal processes.
With the assistance of ZTE, ET released Enterprise Development Blue Book, which optimizes and re-defines its internal processes. In accordance with the Blue Book and based on the industry-leading platform of the NNOC, ZTE customized a set of ITIL-based workflows for ET, including service desk, event management, problem management, asset management, change management, order management, and knowledge base management.
With the support of the NNOC workflows and customized resource aggregation, ET has significantly improved process efficiency. Order management, for example, used to take at least two weeks to open an account for a broadband subscriber, as it involved manual confirmation assignment and document review. Now, the administrative regions and port resources are integrated, and available ports can be found automatically. The period for end-to-end service subscription has been shortened to no more than three days, which greatly improves user satisfaction.

Customized GUIs

The NNOC system not only provides satisfactory functions but also features perfect Web GUIs thanks to one month of communication between ZTE's service customization specialists and a dozen of Ethiopian senior maintenance engineers of the NNOC. 
ZTE customized the GUIs for every page of the NNOC system. Design ideas are used in the visual effects covering the framework, background, images, fonts and colors, and operation convenience covering the menu order, right-click function, and topology drag. Factors that may affect operation experience and efficiency are discussed in detail. The whole O&M department of ET is satisfied with ZTE's interface customization scheme. It perfectly reflects ZTE's service philosophy of "serving with dedication and being committed to our customers."