First, what is CWR?
CWR is short for collaboration, workspace, and realisation. CWR is a solution that enables digital transformation of mobile network operations. It helps carriers digitize the network planning and optimization as well as the service experience operation based on carriers’ processes, driving digital transformation of network operations. It offers a unified digital workspace that uses data from the marketing and network side.
CWR is an innovation to achieve agile operation, value-based network construction, efficient optimisation, excellent customer experience, and marketing support through collaborative operation of internal departments.
For example, it can quickly identify high-value areas and user experience problems. Resolve and close network problems based on the priority criteria pre-defined together with the operator, thus the sequence of optimization, capacity expansion, and site deployment takes this into account.
This helps ensure the user experience is optimum, especially where it matters most. And it can also support the marketing organization for contextual marketing. CWR is a solution from Huawei – a marketing view of the network, compared and combined with the network view.
What’s the difference between these two views?
The marketing view is based on business support systems (BSS), while the network view is based on operations support systems (OSS).
Typically these are different departments that may have targets that are not fully in-sync. There are gaps and there is a challenge when they launch new services and, for example, the capacity is not enough or the network is not ready. The problem is you can’t see the overall situation between the different departments.
And what are the practical uses?
We do and can automate a lot of things in the network. For example an operator might use CWR to migrate services from 2G/3G to 4G. Or another operator might use it to offer different packages to customers. In particular they can look at how they can increase the number of high-value subscribers.
What insights can the operator get via CWR?
The operator can look at what services or applications are most popular – such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook etc. And you can look at the network performance, in terms of the speed levels and resource use, right down to each cell site. You can set different key performance indicators (KPIs) and key quality indicators (KQIs), in terms of video download speed and capacity utilization, for services such as Instagram and Twitter.
Say an operator wanted to focus on high-value services using YouTube. It’s possible with CWR to identify cellsites that have issues that impact on high-value services. The operator can ensure that cells are performing well and mitigate in advance congestion issues.
Does this impact on 5G plans?
Yes, we can use CWR to project where you will have high demand for 5G, and prioritise the area from the knowledge CWR gives us about existing 4G demand. This information is based on real network usage. We can look at the existing network and see what is forecast over the next six months. We can recalibrate the throughput. What will be the average throughput the network will have? Instead of, say, 3Mbps you can ensure you have 7Mbps as the average where it’s needed.
When it comes to 5G, 95% of the networks will be based on existing 4G networks. CWR allows you to take a snapshot for traffic forecasting – and it will tell you what kind of 4G traffic you have and that will enable you to forecast demand in the 5G era.
How does CWR help plan new services?
You can create a plan and forecast how the network will be impacted – where is the expected demand? You can look at the past six to 12 months and see what kind of traffic you already have.
And it will help you identify the issues in the network you might have already, so you know what to focus on.
What are the business benefits?
CWR helps you make precise investments – it helps you know exactly when you need additional capacity and where you need it. And it helps you speed up your go-to-market plan, with new services, new package offerings to the end users. You can make sure these are executed very quickly.
You can reduce, and prioritise expenditure; you can focus your optimisation based on known requirements. And you can reduce or totally eliminate accessibility issues and dropped calls by expanding capacity based on real thresholds, using information about the actual usage of sites.
We’ve been developing CWR in Huawei for two or three years and now the service is mature, and many operators have already started to use it. More than 50 operators had deployed the solution and/or running proofs of concept (PoC).
