Uganda- Airtel (3000 sites)

On March 2013, Innovis secured an exclusive Five-year Managed Services project with Uganda?s Airtel (Under Nokia Managed Services) which is a leading Indian telecommunication company. The contract includes Managed Services for Airtel?s existing network as well as all the main equipment and accessory facilities of the BTS and Node B sites for the next five
years. It will include site maintenance, management of equipment from multiple vendors. Originally the RAN equipment was from Ericsson and Nokia, now it comprises Nokia, Huawei and ZTE. Also, the transmission network has nodes from Ericsson and Huawei largely and the core is from Huawei.

On March 2018, Innovis further secured next 4 years extension for the same contract.

About Airtel

Airtel is an Indian global telecommunications services company based in New Delhi, India. It operates in 19 countries across South Asia and Africa. Airtel provides GSM, 3G and 4G LTE mobile services, fixed line broadband and voice services depending upon the country of operation. It is the largest mobile network operator in India and the third largest in the world with 325 million subscribers Airtel Uganda is the second-largest mobile network provider in the country, with an estimated 10 million subscribers.

Key Objectives

  • Improvement of Network Availability and KPIs
  • Maintaining a very responsive maintenance team
  • Support major projects such as network consolidation of Airtel and Warid
  • Ensuring timely preventive and corrective maintenance
  • Establishing a governance model based on global best practices

Innovis is handling sites all across Uganda

Managing Seamless Transition

Management control of Warid employees from Warid-Airtel to Innovis. Additional scope for passive infrastructure maintenance at core locations taken up at short notice with fresh recruitments.

Airtel-Warid Network Consolidation / Conrad

  • Apart from normal operations – acceptance was done for 871 MW links,789 BTS & 412 3G
  • Day & Night Transmission support provided for routing of E1 / VLAN’s for Conrad sites
  • Parallel protection testing done with Ericsson / Huawei team
  • Field Engineer support in providing access to project teams, supporting project in outages, providing emergency spares
  • Field Engineer support in upgrading links / changing HW followed by night activities

Initiatives to improve performance

Infrastructure

  • Creation of new base locations
  • Replacement of old vehicles-GPS installed on new vehicles
  • Additional tools
  • Additional resource added for spare management

Motivation

  • Special Incentive scheme – which includes instant cash awards, Star of the month, Best TL of the month and Star of the Quarter
  • Team building events organized
  • Regular open house meetings organized in regions

Training

  • Regular training programs for local and expat resources.

After Innovis took over the network operation and maintenance, the monthly SLA level exceeds 99%. Six months later, the network KPIs were significantly improved due to Innovis professional operation and maintenance.

  • 2G NW availability all across Uganda has been in an increasing trend and above targets.
  • 3G NW availability also has been continuously increasing month on month. Efforts being done for network optimization and quality improvement.