Streamlining cell phone network maintenance

For the past several years, cell phone service providers have been pressed to significantly reduce their costs of doing business. The pressure comes from their general need to improve their overall financial performance due to competitive and economic forces, and their desire to accomplish these financial improvements while investing in the next-generation technologies necessary to meet customers' demands for bandwidth and advanced services and applications. Reducing the costs associated with network maintenance, which represents a sizeable portion of operating expenditures, is one way to help meet these goals. And as operators have become more willing to bring in third-party companies to manage various aspects of their services, the practice of outsourcing maintenance activities has found traction. Maintenance services are distinct from managed services, however. Maintenance typically includes complex technical support services and repairing equipment problems as they occur, while managed services tends to cover the proactive 24/7 management of the network, according to Roosmarijn Cornelissen, research analyst in the European telecommunications and networking group at IDC. And while the line between the two types of services is beginning to blur, "maintenance is usually offered and delivered as a separate service from managed services," she said. Because most networks are built and maintained by numerous vendors, service providers--led by operators in Europe and India--have found ways to establish multi-vendor maintenance strategies.