MegaFon and NEC have announced the completion of a live field-test to incorporate AI technology into the Russian network to improve the efficiency of planning and maintenance of transport network resources.

The tests took place in MegaFon Ural’s network from October to November, with the NEC AI algorithms analysing 150 radio links which were considered the most critical to the network. The test itself was considered a successful with the telco seeing benefits for both the demand forecast and predictive maintenance objectives.

“Our partnership with NEC aligns with our goals of efficiently improving the planning and maintenance of networks, which is becoming increasingly complex,” said Anton Sherbakov, Technical Director for MegaFon Ural. “Through analytics of big volumes of data with NEC’s AI technologies, ‘NEC the WISE’, we have verified that significant improvements can be achieved for the planning and operation of transport networks, resulting in more effective use of resources and providing the highest quality services to millions of subscribers.”

“We are very pleased to see our services streamline and optimize MegaFon’s network without the need to expend additional resources,” said Hiroshi Kawada, MD of NEC Neva

Communications Systems. “We aim to enhance our partnership with MegaFon and to continue delivering the latest innovations to the entire operator network.”

Looking at the demand forecast side of the test, the pair claim the AI component was 97% accurate when it came to traffic prediction against actual traffic. Predictive maintenance is a bit more difficult to justify on the spreadsheets, if the algorithm is accurate the negative instance never actually happens, but both seem happy with the results.

‘NEC the WISE’ is a product line up which was announced back in 2016 but now with the current euphoria surrounding AI, it seems to be making some useful headlines for NEC. While those who are stoking the 5G fire seem to be focusing on generating new revenue channels for the telcos, this product line has been billed for efficiency. This portfolio has been in the works for the last couple of years, but is now being pitched to clients, but NEC has also stated it plans to deliver a fully automated network operation solution by 2020.

Whether a fully autonomous network is achievable by 2020 remains to be seen, but the normalization of more optimized networks might be more accurate.