Wadaro, a start-up to watch, has been discussed in a number of previous weblog articles. They’re now deployed across a number of operators and the tip of a very large iceberg of results from monitoring the network as the customers’ experience it are described here. For reasons of confidentiality the networks these results were gathered over is not identified.
The first figure, see below, shows the call drop ratio for a number of phone manufacturers. There are over 85k device types in Wadaro’s database, the data here is for those devices / manufacturers with the most records which provides the best accuracy. For those of us with iPhones, this clearly shows something we’ve been experience for many years, they drop calls. A call drop ratio of 2% is normally considered the minimum acceptable level, that is about one in 50 calls dropped, and as can be seen in the figure even phones from LG and Samsung are missing that target.
Examining the service ratio, that is the ratio of device on-time to the time the device is connected to the network is shown in the next figure, see below. Sagemcom devices have a problem. Imagine being empowered with this information as a customer in selecting your device. Operators can use this information to request improvements in devices as poorly performing devices dent their reputation and results in higher customer care costs. It’s surprising such customer-experience biased measurements are not common place across all operators today. Wadaro can collect much information associated with specific events, so can deep dive into specific device and / or network related problems.
An important finding is they have detected a large number of rogue devices, that is having an invalid IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) or the IMEI occurs more than once on a single network and/or across several disparate networks. Wadaro have a method of ‘finger printing’ devices so when they detect an invalid IMEI they can check the finger print of a device with known good devices to determine what the rogue device actually is compared to what the IMEI purports it to be. This information is then used to moderate the KPI (Key Performance Index) reporting. Here are just a few of the dodgy IMEIs with the occurrence from a small sample of their data: 135790246811222 occurred 1982 times, 00000000000000 occurred 1015 times, 355387041490568 occurred 206 times, and 352751019523267 occurred 166 times.
Below are the results of call drop ratio by some phone models. This highlights some of the specific models that have a problem, e.g. Nokia C2 and 1616 models and the Vodafone 250 model. Given Vodafone’s focus on achieving Amazon-like levels of customer service success, using Wadaro will provide the insight they need to move towards that goal.
