Operators have large teams of field sales staff working with small, medium and large corporations selling the full complement of voice and data services.

Operators have large teams of field sales staff working with small, medium and large corporations selling the full complement of voice and data services. However, in a typical sales situation, it has traditionally been very difficult to verify the quality of the network behind these services while at the customer’s premises.

Ideally, a member of sales staff needs to be able to prove the network capacity meets the needs of the customer – providing enough bandwidth and voice accessibility. To achieve this, sales staff currently rely on crowdsourced data available via downloadable applications. Here, you can test the up and downlink on-site, showing the capacity at that moment in time but any deeper analysis is very difficult. Using crowd sourced data, if a bandwidth test run by the sales executive gave a sub-optimum level of performance, operators were forced to send a technical consultant with indoor measurement tools to fully measure the indoor coverage and report back to the network optimisation team for further analysis and troubleshooting. Now using the Nemo IBC meter, the sales staff can do everything onsite!

Operators have long expressed the need for a tool that would do more. They demand an application that can easily verify the quality of the network and that allows data to be stored (and used) by the operators’ customer support, network planning and network optimisation teams. They want to have an accurate snapshot of the potential customer’s network quality while the sales staff is still on the customer’s premises.

In response to this demand, Anite has launched its Nemo In-building Coverage Meter at CTIA in Las Vegas. The smartphone-based tool allows operators’ sales staff to demonstrate data and voice service quality on all wireless technologies from 2G to LTE. The member of staff operating the tool does not need to be an engineer, as the very simple UI offers a simple graphical illustration of the quality of voice and data services. Despite the simple UI, the data derived is of a drive-test depth and can instantly be sent back to engineering teams for network optimisation and troubleshooting. The Android-based tool has been designed to run on latest commercial smartphones like Samsung S5. With the Nemo IBC Meter sales staff is able to prove the network immediately – at site – saving both time and money.

Author: Mr Jarno Siurua, Director, handheld products, Anite