Developing Telecoms | Huawei helps out Saudi Telecom during peak pilgrim traffic

9 February 2012

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Huawei helps out Saudi Telecom during peak pilgrim traffic

Tuesday, 23 January 2007 00:00 | Alec Barton

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The Hajj is the world's largest annual religious pilgrimage: three million participants worldwide arrive in Mecca, a 10 km² area. Over five days this same area witnesses one of the highest mobile traffic densities in the world. Even Saudi Telecom Company (STC), the biggest mobile operator in the Middle East, experiences unique and massive challenges.

In 2006 the total traffic volume borne by STC network increased 30% over 2005, with peak traffic volume recorded at 19 times the usual rate. As if that was not enough, short messages increased 137 times.

To help STC cope, Huawei supplied its integrated service solution and sophisticated mobile softswitch equipment to sustain STC's peak telecom traffic during the Hajj. In fact, this was the second consecutive year that Huawei helped STC provide adequate capacity to support the enormous increase in demand for services during this period.

During 2005's Hajj, STC achieved uninterrupted coverage. Key to this was Huawei's mobile softswitch solution, claimed by the manufacturer to offer large capacity and high processing capabilities. In 2006, even with a rise in traffic volume, STC repeated its performance, reporting zero overload, interruption or faults with its network.

In addition to the mobile softswitch solution, STC also deployed Huawei's specialised network services to ensure smooth operations during peak traffic conditions. Huawei's network optimisation solution can boost the resource utilisation ratio by evenly distributing load over the network based on an analysis of consumer behaviour, traffic model predictions and evaluation of network resources usage. Huawei engineers also take into consideration the complicated multi-vendor network structure and design detailed solutions to ensure network stability regardless of the level of performance of any component equipment in the network. With its network operation and maintenance tool system, Huawei can collect data in real time, and analyse and monitor the data in support of effective network maintenance.

* STC (Saudi Telecom Company) is the biggest mobile operator in both the Middle East and Africa. Its network capacity exceeds 10 million and now serves 12 million mobile subscribers and 4.5 million fixed line subscribers.

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