Success Story

Telenor Norway
By Luo Zuoguo

The fastest ever and top quality GSM/UMTS network migration in Europe

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On October 6th at around 3 pm, the LAST site was swapped!

Site no 6379 was Hoevikfjellet in Aure, Mre og Romsdal

This is the biggest upgrade of the mobile network in Norway we have ever carried out. It will create a solid and flexible base for further developing the services offered by the Telenor mobile network and the quality of those services. Our aim is to provide customers with better, more innovative services across the country. This means better in terms of capacity, speed and stability. Ragnar Krhus, former CEO of Telenor Norway, November 2009.

On 6th of Oct. 2011, 15:00 local time, the last site in Telenor Norway BRAIN RAN project went on air, which indicates that Telenor Norway BRAIN RAN project swap has been successfully delivered seven weeks ahead of master plan, thus enabling Telenor to provide better network quality and the latest services to all mobile users in the home market, Norway. This is the largest scale network infrastructure upgrade in Telenor Norway history and it is also the fastest ever mobile network implementation in Europe: 856 co-located physical GSM&UMTS sites were swapped in high volume month, 60 sites per day and averagely 600 sites per month in volume phase which lasted 10 months. Telenor and Huawei have jointly made a new record and benchmark for the industry. People are gathering in the swap centre room in Fornebu, Telenor headquarters, to

witness the historical moment. Excitingly, while suddenly, the room turns to silence and tears was coming out from peoples eyes Looking back over the past two years, some episodes are unforgettable. There have been difficulties, struggles and even tears, while most are for the joy of success and the great feeling of achieving milestones one after another.

Opportunities only to those who are prepared

In the telecommunication industry, there has been a saying that the vendor, who owns the Nordic, owns the world. Nordic market is considered as one of the top high-end markets in the world and it is also the place where the worlds top telecommunication vendors originated from. It is the home market for them. Nordic had been one

Last site swap finish celebration in swap room

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Telenor, one of the major telecommunication operators in the world, owns the largest market share in its home market Norway, decided to choose Huawei, the leading telecom service provider in the world while a newcomer in Nordic, to be the best partner of the entire mobile network upgrade including GSM, UMTS and LTE in Norway. That was where the story started from

of the few markets that Huawei wireless solutions had not dominated prior to 2009. In October, 2009, history has been changed. In order to keep providing the best services to mobile users and reduce both CAPEX and OPEX, Telenor decided to replace all existing radio access network provided by

existing two vendors in Norway. Existing network vendors were determined to win the contract in order to reinforce their domination in mobile network industry, while newcomers were eager to break through the market starting from here. With leading Single-RAN product solutions, excellent service delivery capabilities and

strong willingness, Huawei was finally selected to be the preferred vendor for the upcoming six years of mobile network upgrade equipment and service provider. This is the biggest overhaul of the Norwegian mobile network we've ever made, and creates a solid foundation for further development of services and quality

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of service in Telenor's mobile network. The main goal is to give our customers better and more innovative services across the country. With better, we mean capacity, speed and stability, says Ragnar Krhus, former head of Telenor Norway. The selection of suppliers has been made after an extensive tender process of negotiations. Vendors have been assessed for technical requirements and specifications, future plans, commercial terms and conditions that may ensure a stable, effective and predictable cooperation. It was a close competition between vendors, but ultimately it was Huawei who emerged as the winner outright. Technical quality, credibility in relation to the extensive replacement of equipment, as well as commercial conditions combined were crucial. adds Krhus. This was the first mobile network SWAP contract Huawei won in Nordic from top operators in its home market in Europe. Huawei, with its proven Single-RAN solution and service delivery capability in other markets all over world, has the opportunity to better fuel Telenors success. Meanwhile, it was even more challenging for Telenor, as Norway is most important market which is not only where the headquarters is located but also where the most revenue and profit contributes for Telenor group. No failure but only success, for both Telenor and Huawei.

However, local resources which were the main power that the project had to rely on, were extremely limited in Norway. The population of Norway is around 5 million and telecom graduates from NTNU, one of the biggest universities in engineering and technologies, are around 30 per year. While, to deliver this project, more than 600 people were needed from Telenor, Huawei and local swap subcontractors. To solve resource bottleneck and establish delivery capacity quickly, Telenor, Huawei and all subcontractors in BRAIN RAN project started to explore talents, not only in Scandinavian language speaking countries (Norway, Sweden and Denmark), but also other countries all over the world. The project finally became an international club which had people from more than 25 nationalities working together. Harsh geographical and weather conditions Norway locates between 58N and 71N, with five months of snow year round, and some areas might have -40C cold weather for months. Norway is a tourist paradise with mountains all over the country and most beautiful fjords in the world, while, it is not good at all for swap, especially in the long snowing

winter. Moreover, the weather in Norway changes so rapidly that outdoor activities become more difficult. There are more than 2500 sites where helicopters are needed to transport equipment and engineers to the spot to do survey, installation and swap. Sometimes helicopters had to wait for hours just for the weather to become fine to be able to fly. Even when arriving at a spot, you might not be able to find the site as there was heavy snow all around you. Effective Solutions, Striving for Perfection Those difficulties were challenging for swap but they could not stop the swap. Both Telenor and Huawei realized that to make the swap activities as a product line was the only way to make the swap smooth and successful. As a product line, we should have centralized support, control and clear processes to guarantee the swap runs on track and in an efficient manner. Meanwhile, highly disciplined swap teams and efficient post swap performance optimization is key to drive the fast swap with high quality, says David Tang, BAIN RAN project director of Huawei. It was a common understanding for Telenor and swap subcontractors as well. Therefore, the project team started to work from those main aspects.

Mission Impossible? Believe you can and you are halfway there!
Challengesfar more than expected It was not easy to win this contract for Huawei and even deliver a better quality network. BRAIN RAN project was established and given the responsibility of swapping the complete radio access network of Telenor Norway, which contains 6379 GSM and UMTS co-located physical sites and 9000 GSM and UMTS logical Nodes. Huawei had vast swap experiences, while challenges in Norway were far more than that expected. Limited local resource: In order to deliver this project, Huawei allocated experienced expertise to Norway from all over the world.

Heavy snow to the site

Snow coated sites

Helicopter transportation

Offshore Oil platform sites swap

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contains work from survey, design, transportation, swap execution, to optimization and documentation archiving, which need cooperation across all teams involved. Huawei, together with Telenor and swap subcontractors, developed project level E2E process which integrated key actions, milestones and Lead time of Telenor, Huawei and subcontractors, and clarify the responsibility of each party in project delivery. SOP (Standard Operation Procedure), one of the most important procedures, which was considered as the bible and common language for swap, was developed by Huawei, together with Telenor and swap subcontractors. It clearly defined all activities of a site swap, from swap team set out in the morning, cell block, transmission re-route to service verification and alarm clean up. Putting procedures in place was important and training of swap teams was also the key to guarantee of successful and high quality of swap. In order to quickly equip the international swap teams with Huawei swap technologies and be familiar with swap disciplines, more than 10 rounds of training sessions were held. The training topics were designed based on requirements and problems in different swap teams and swap phases. It has been proved that as swap teams became more and more experiences and skillful, with military style of project control procedure, seamless cooperation between all parties, swaps were made not only in line with plan but also with high quality. Downtime was minimized and swap related problem occurrences were also controlled in a very low level which provided a sound basis for further network optimization. Post swap optimization, improving network performance quickly To make swap as a product line, swap execution is important while post swap network optimization and documentation archiving is also the key to inspect and measure swap quality from both network performance and engineering implementation perspectives. In this project, dedicated expertise from documentation and optimization teams continuously

Efficient Network Optimizations

Highly Deciplined Swap Teams

Centralized Swap Room Support and Control

Clear Process and Strict Plan

10-20 calls/site between field and swap room

Tool for monitoring in swap room

SWAP ROOM Swap: Coordination Cell block Site Integration Configuratiion Verification Neighbours Transmission: GIPS X-Nett SDH DXX BRUM BRUT

Remote configuration of equipment

Plan for swap in swap room

Telenor Norway BRAIN RAN Project Swap Room

Centralized swap room provides efficient support and control Huawei Norway office is inside of Telenor headquarters building and originally it was where the Huawei project members were working and it was one floor straight upstairs of Telenor project office. In order to enhance centralized swap support and control, have more convenient and closer communication between project members, Telenor and Huawei decided to establish an office where all key resources could work seamlessly together. Swap room was then setup equipped with PCs, swap hotline systems, IT infrastructures and all necessary systems by Telenor. It was the coordination and plan center and provided technical support for all problems concerning the swap. It played an extremely important role in the project, just as the brain.

Moreover, several swap systems were setup to make the swap more automatic and efficient. All swap activities were synchronized and monitored in a swap room dashboard system simultaneously for every single site, every single swap. Any discrepancies against the plan could be discovered and investigated immediately. Thanks to those applications, especially the SRD and consistency check systems, they not only assisted us to perform the swap efficiently, but also made it easier for the technical team to inspect and manage problems , says Rocky Luo, fault manager of BRAIN RAN project from Huawei. Procedure based control methodologies guarantee high quality Swap is a highly integrated activity which

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focusing on post swap activities and drove the project to run smoothly ahead. With fast and effective network optimization after swap, performance of swapped network was improved rapidly and quality reached Excellent level according to Telenor standard. From both KPI statistics and drive tests demonstrated that network quality was improved dramatically after swap. Telenor is very impressed and happy with the performance of Huawei. It is very good that the project is on track. Telenor expectations to the project have been more than fulfilled says Rolv-Erik Spilling, former CTO Telenor Norway.

One team one goal

One team one goal is the slogan of the project and the BRAIN RAN project delivery is the best interpretation for it. The delivery of the project is a story that demonstrates how operator and vendor work together to build the best network for end-users. People might have different opinions when problems came, especially when doing technical troubleshooting, as Telenor swap room manager, Mr Age.Haland said, However, I have never heard any blame between each other when problems popped up. We are always thinking about how to solve the problems, not blaming anyone. People are always smiling. There were many sites which were technically

complicated and most of them covered important areas. In order to guarantee the successful swap, a joint team was established to work on it. Kenth.Sivertsen, site expert from Telenor, (and Relacom), always thoroughly explained to Huawei so as to make correct site swap solution and he went to many site supporting swap together with Huawei teams as well. The sites in Telenor headquarters were extremely

complicated and important, Telenor experts worked on site together with Huawei for more than twelve hours and finally the swap was accomplished perfectly without any issues.

Together, we can make things different and better

The project is finished, Telenor now is providing best in test mobile network service to users and further strengthen its leading position in Norway. Meanwhile, new swap benchmarking is created in Europe. It again proves Huawei innovative Single-RAN solution, excellent service delivery capability in global high-end market and customer oriented determinations. It starts a new chapter for the cooperation between Telenor and Huawei. Telenor and Huawei have already started to do lessons learning and are looking forward to creating new miracles. Because, we believe Together, we can make things different and better!

Area
Single-site Verification (handover)

Provisional Acceptance (PAC)

Final acceptance (FAC)

Cluster

CC handling Optimization Drive tests Statistics Optimization

Site

Single site Service verification

BRAIN RAN post swap network optimization work flow

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