Telenor Norway chose Huawei for its home market network swap and despite a large number of difficulties, the swap was accomplished in record time. 

Telenor (Norway), a global telecommunicator, owns the largest market share in its home territory. For its nationwide GSM/UMTS/LTE network upgrade project, part of its BRAIN (Broadband Radio Access IP network) program, it chose Huawei, a leading telecom service provider but then a newcomer to Northern Europe, to be its partner, despite there being plenty of more prestigious competitors closer to home.

A big risk

Telenor Norway had decided to replace its dual-vendor radio access network infrastructure, with Huawei being the leading candidate. Huawei’s technical prowess (SingleRAN), excellent service delivery capabilities, and willingness to go the extra mile won Telenor over. Both parties signed a six-year contract for Huawei infrastructure and service provision.

Signing this contract was a gamble for both sides, as this was Huawei’s first network swap of its kind in Northern Europe. A failure would have told the world that Huawei was not ready to compete with its Western rivals on their own ground, while Telenor risked even more as Huawei was rebuilding its home-market network and primary revenue source.

A grand task

The BRAIN RAN project represented a complete swap of Telenor Norway’s radio access network, which was composed of 6379 GSM/UMTS co-located physical sites and 9000 GSM/UMTS logical nodes. Huawei had ample swap experience, but not in a situation quite like this. More than 2500 sites required helicopter access, which often involved a lot of waiting for conditions to be right. Even if the weather was clear, the snow often covered up landmarks and even made the sites themselves resemble so many strange outposts on another world. Another hindrance to this project was manpower. Northern Europe may produce outstanding engineers, but not in great numbers. Norway has only five million people and only thirty telecom majors graduate every year from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the second largest out of Norway’s eight universities. In contrast, more than 600 engineers were needed to deliver this project. Telenor, Huawei, and all subcontractors, had to broaden their horizons, with 25 nationalities eventually coming on board.

Several exclusive systems were set up to automate and streamline the swap process; all incorporated Huawei’s comprehensive and proven swap procedures. All swap activities were synchronized and monitored through a dashboard system of sorts that could incorporate key data for every single site and swap; this allowed any discrepancies to be discovered immediately. “Thanks to those applications, especially the swap room dashboard and consistency check systems, they not only assisted us in performing the swap efficiently, but also made it easier for the technical team to inspect and manage problems,” said Rocky Luo, Huawei’s Fault Manager for the BRAIN RAN project. With the swap room dashboard (SRD) system, 55 activities and/or indices could be shared and monitored in real time for each node swap. If the swap team was even five minutes late to the work site, HQ knew almost immediately. Through a consistent checking system, 20 key steps and parameters could be checked and integrated for a single site, helping to eliminate the errors that creep up during a high-volume swap.

Swap execution is important, but so are post-swap network optimization and documentation archiving. Without them, Telenor would certainly not have been able to deem its post-swap network “excellent.” Both OSS KPIs and drive-tests showed the new network to be vastly improved, with the latter indicating that data drops and dropped calls had decreased by 25 and 38%, respectively. “Telenor is very impressed and happy with the performance of Huawei. It is very good that the project is on track. Telenor expectations for the project have been more than fulfilled,” said Rolv-Erik Spilling, former CTO of Telenor Norway.