Beeline: popular control (technical problem on the map can be noted)
Yellow markers - good connection quality or a ticket, the closure of which was confirmed by the subscriber. Red - engineering tasks at work.
We tested in Kazan a service that allows you to pick up and poke on a card with feedback on the quality of communication. During the test, 700 reviews came (including positive ones), of which about 200 became tickets for engineers. 95% of tickets were successfully closed, the rest - from the series "you can not argue with physics."
After the test, we decided to roll out the functionality to the sites of all cities. In the meantime, I’ll tell you why the network service signaling is not enough to receive data and how you can help.
Why do we need popular control?
When a base station is put into operation, it is assumed that it provides a good level of communication throughout its coverage. However, the network is almost a living structure. Somewhere a house is being built, somewhere a house is being demolished, somewhere a tree grows above the roof and so on. Simply put, the interference pattern of radio wave propagation is changing.
Service signaling of the network allows very quickly detect failures on the equipment itself. Naturally, we need constant measurement data at different points of coverage plus a means of finding complexly diagnosed bugs.
The first remedy is an onsite laboratory . A machine with many antennas and terminals inside:
Departure of the laboratory is quite expensive, plus patrol cars to the city are usually a dozen or less. Naturally, another means was needed. So we bought a container of pink Samsung Galaxy S II for the MQA project to make such miracle devices that we put in our company cars:
This allowed us to sharply increase the coverage of “patrols” and, if necessary, put the devices in the cellars, but cut the research functionality. It was assumed that the application that runs on these pink phones will be installed for users who want to help.
However, there were two problems:
1. Continuous measurements greatly increase power consumption, usually by at least 50–70%. Plus, the traffic is about 200 MB per day at least.
2. Even with the voluntary consent of the subscriber to install, the application collects too much data, which creates a number of legal difficulties. In fact, we could afford to distribute the application only to our engineers under the terms of a communication license in the territory of the Russian Federation.
Popular control
As a result, realizing that with 100% automation, not everything is as smooth as we would like, we raised a service that allows you to just poke a point on the map and describe in words what kind of problem it is.
In the test, it worked like this: the subscriber visits the site, indicates the address and feedback. Then the review is sorted: something goes to the engineers for the network operation ticket, something goes to the usual support (it happens, a person asks for a tariff) and so on. In practice - out of 700 reviews, 200 went to tickets, of which 182 went to the operation service. We responded to 100% of the reviews within 48 hours.
The second point of entry: in each sales office in Tatarstan there were special laptops in the hall in a prominent place where this site was opened. The staff was trained to explain about the reviews, plus posters were hanging, there were badges on the sellers about this service.
The third point: we did a student quest with a plot, which also came down to measurements in various difficult places in the city. 300 students threw us about 50 technical tickets.
They write not only from Kazan - there were also reviews from subscribers whose numbers are not in our regional capacity.
Approximately 10% of tickets required further elaboration - from experience, we were expecting a larger number, but subscribers tried to write in great detail.
Engineering ticket is being studied. As a rule, it takes 2 days to process the application and respond to it. Most of the tasks were solved during the second day (on the first day, the point is scheduled in the next day, then the engineer goes and looks in place).
Not all tickets can be resolved quickly or can be solved at all. For example, the subscriber does not like the quality of communication in the shopping center with the architecture of “a bank of reinforcement + glass with metal”. Naturally, there you need to put an indoor solution like this . In this case, we answered the subscriber about the approximate terms of the decision and the reasons why it is impossible to make a good connection today.
According to the resolved tickets, most of all there were cases of sudden construction projects for us, where the sector ceased to finish reaching the border of the coverage area. From an interesting point, an LTE antenna mount loosened at one of the points, the subscriber complained about the lack of an LTE signal. We left, found (this service alarm does not show).
Case Studies
Appeal:
On the street, the connection catches well, all the sticks, at home it’s not very maximum 3, in some parts of the apartment it doesn’t catch at all, although I live on the 4th floor, it’s not very low. The second line is wonderful. Internet speed in package 300 is excellent. But sometimes from 3G and H it changes to Gprs and EDGE. Moreover, this instability does not depend on the place of stay. For a long time, in the region of the month in the apartment only the edge was catching, recently it has stabilized to 3g and H. There are sometimes calls when the phone is turned on, the phone is on the table and the SMS arrives so they can’t get through.
The situation is generally mundane: the metal structures of the building attenuate the 3G signal, and the 2G signal with the best distribution normally passes into the room. The subscriber fell into the interference minimum, where the phone “jumps” between 2G and 3G. This is only solved by increasing the density of the 3G BS installation in Naberezhnye Chelny. They told the subscriber about this and explained that in 2015 it is planned to install another 15 base stations, which should solve the problem.
Subscriber Comment:
Thank you for your reply! It is very pleasant that the company takes time to respond to customer reviews!
Appeal:
No LTE coverage. 4G is missing. USIM SIM card, with 4g. Tablet ipad mini retina. Moscow region, city of Kazan, st. Decembrists 191/93
This is a duplicate of what we already saw from the service signaling. Regularly repaired.
Subscriber Comment:
Everything worked) thanks, Polina!
Kazan office is the best in the Volga region.
Here is another interesting case. The subscriber complained that every month he had the same problem with his USB modem: after charging the subscription fee, the speed of mobile Internet did not increase to the initial level, and he had to call support every time asking him to fix it.
By the time of the appeal, he had already started the procedure for changing the number and at the same time, having seen the site, left a review. We lifted the unloading of all calls and found that the support each time raised his speed manually, but no one saw the taxonomy. As a result, a rather difficult reproducible error was found in the system settings, which our colleagues almost immediately corrected. We told all this to the subscriber and asked for another chance. The subscriber believed us, canceled the transfer. As a result, the subscriber stayed with us, thanked for the participation.