Nokia Networks picks WANdisco to eliminate outages

Mobile phone

Nokia Networks will be able to predict network outages and improve the quality of people's mobile phone calls after signing a deal with WANdisco that could last for up to three years.

The Finnish firm, which looks after around 50 per cent of the world's mobile networks, will task WANdisco with eliminating network outages for billions of mobile users.

To do this, Nokia will use the Big Data specialist's Fusion product to ensure customers of mobile operators relying on its infrastructure do not experienced dropped calls or unsent text messages.

Fusion will help mobile operators predict and avoid network problems by replicating mobile data onto other networks instead, according to WANdisco CEO David Richards.

"Nokia Networks runs a service that absolutely cannot go down. They are looking for failures in their networks and there are patterns where you can predict failures which are going to happen, Richards told IT Pro.

"In the event of a problem they will re-route the signal to another call tower and they can analyse what's going on on the network constantly."

Richards estimated it will take between two and three years for Nokia Networks to roll out its technology, with Fusion embedded, to the mobile operators using its networks.

The deal was signed after WANdisco also helped Nokia Networks move its subscriber data management (SDM) software onto Hadoop to speed up mobile operators' new customer activations.

With Nokia Networks' infrastructure running on Hadoop, the firm picked WANdisco's Fusion product to have the option of shifting between Hadoop deployments the tool works with Oracle BDA, Cloudera, Hortonworks, EMC and MapR Hadoop environments.

Peter Kerekes, Nokia Business PLM of customer experience management, said: "Implementing SDM on Hadoop was a big step forward in improving the user experience for our mobile carrier customers, as well as their end customers.

"However, we faced other significant challenges around the extreme levels of availability, performance and guaranteed real-time data consistency across locations that our customers required.

"No other solution we evaluated came close to WANdisco Fusion in meeting our requirements, as well as giving us the flexibility to move to different Hadoop platforms."