A Case Study in Building Mobile Applications by Trey Sunderland Click Here to View NetDemo (Click on link to View NetDemo Presentation) Download 5MB PowerPoint Presentation Click Here

An Industry Driving Down Costs

Mobile Phone Service Providers (MPSP) have long known that companies that erect and install the premise equipment do not always perform the installation according to the engineers' specifications.  Incorrectly installed equipment on tower sites often result in less coverage or weaker coverage than designed.  For this reason most cellular companies perform on-site surveys of their new sites to verify the installation and document the actual configuration.  

Equipment in the cell site shelters is also often misplaced.  When contractors perform equipment changes after lightning strikes or equipment failure, old or burned out equipment is often left in place in the rack with replacements being installed in a new location.  Lack of space and misplaced equipment in the racks often leads to either delays during service calls or return visits to complete maintenance. Both scenarios result in increased operating costs.  

With accurate documentation the MPSP engineers can provide accurate instruction and equipment to contractors, which can result in a reduction of return trips, reduced install time, accurate inventory, and better quality of service.  

January 2002

Loui Consulting Group engaged Atlantic Tower Services (ATS), an on-site survey and maintenance provider.  ATS was providing documentation to an MPSP about the physical layout of the antennas, rack mounted equipment, and various other attributes of each site.  The MPSP could then compare these details to the designed layout.  

The MPSP was particularly concerned with one key component of the survey.  The site survey had to be able to convey to the MPSP engineers the layout of the antennas which includes position on the tower, antenna type, the angle relative to the horizon and their levelness.  These factors are most important to the MPSP since they directly impact the coverage of the tower and compliance with FCC licensing.  

Field Inventory Complexity

The details of the diagram in the report allow the cellular company’s engineers to change the configuration in order to boost coverage.  Without knowing the exact location, type of antenna, or angles, a configuration changed by the engineer may or may not be accurate.  The order may even cause a problem if the cell tower erector misplaced or improperly configured the antenna array.

The survey includes over 180 separate data points and allows for comments on any number of items so that observations could be relayed to the engineers.  To reduce unnecessary questions, the order of the questions changes for each tower type or antenna array.  

The original process of conducting a site survey entailed the following:

• Generally two employees would visit the site and measure cable lengths, and note rack-mounted equipment in the shelter.

• After climbing the tower, one of the employees would note the types of antennas, jumper cables and other details required.

• The data acquired at the top of the tower would be transferred to the written report on the ground. 

• The written report would be taken back to the office and entered into a computer and printed.

• Pictures of problems at the site would be developed from 35mm film and matched to each report in a manual process.

• The final paper report would be delivered to the MPSP engineers at a monthly meeting.

As a result of the lengthy manual process, surveys completed the week before a scheduled meeting might not be delivered to them until the following meeting, sometimes 35 days after the survey took place!  

ATS and the MPSP engineers wanted a faster way to generate the reports…  

The Technical Details

Since the towers all provide mobile phone service the obvious choice for a faster service was to use phones to enter the data from the 7-page site survey.  This information could be combined with digital pictures to produce an HTML report that could be viewed by the MPSP engineers.  These reports could be viewed online, emailed to other engineers or operations personnel, and printed if necessary.  

How to Collect Information

The site survey was analyzed to determine a way to enter the information working within the confines of the text limitations of a phone.  The biggest hurtle of the survey was the diagram and representing the data from the tower arrays in the same format that the MPSP engineers required.  A number of iterations resulted in a structured data entry sequence that could accommodate any of the tower types, array types, show the antenna locations both open and closed positions on the antenna brackets.  Once this data was collected the ability to turn this data into a consistent diagram proved technically challenging due to the sheer number of possible configurations.  Ultimately this challenge was solved using some "off the shelf” products currently used by many websites to produce graphics, resulting in a very powerful tool without the long lead-time of custom development.  

Initially the coding for the phone entry provided error checking of the data at each step, storing of the information for parsing, data clean up, and editing.  Pictures were uploaded from a digital camera to a computer by the manager of the survey crews.  After the surveys were ready and approved for posting, they were moved to a password protected website for viewing by MPSP engineers.  

This first generation product made results ready to be viewed within 24-48 hours.  After extensive testing it was determined that this product had too many technical limitations that prevented changes to be incorporated.

The size of the report ultimately lead to problems with data integrity and new features were requested.  A new architecture was implemented and the groundwork for a new flexible system that could be tailored to any data collection activity was begun.  The system was moved to the new architecture within a week and the data checking features were moved to a server so that updates could be performed from any web accessible system.  The enhancements that had been requested were implemented, but then the survey crews wanted to change the order of data collection to match their work pattern.  

The ability to re-order the questions and tasks was key to the development of a new framework that is now the ExecuTrack System.  

Specifications / Features

• Available via the internet 24-hours per day
• Operates via the wireless web
• Stores site and job information such as location, equipment and customer information
• Allows for transmission of data to corporate databases such as
  ORACLE, SQL Server, MS Access
• HTML input screens for web-connected users
• Generates reports utilizing intelligent Flash technology for automated engineering
  drawings, charts, tables or schematics
• Manager-level approval of inspection and report postings prior to publication
• Secure password protection (SSL or non-SSL option)
• Default settings for the most common answers or configurations
• Time stamps the beginning and end of data input for maintenance crew tracking
• Associate audio, cad drawings, pictures or other associated documents with any report
• Export to any popular data format
• Automated email notification
• Masked input
• Fully customizable