Elisa is proud of its efficient SON

Finnish operator Elisa is so happy with its self-organising network tech, developed with Red Hat, that it wants the whole world to know about it.

Elisa is quite big on uncapped data tariffs and as a consequence experiences disproportionately high volumes of traffic over its network. This has led it to make a special effort to make its network more efficient, which is where SON comes in. Developed on Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform, Elisa SON claims to double the user data throughput on the existing network.

“Our automated network optimization solution offers operators both operating and capital expenditure savings,” said Elisa CTO Kalle Lehtinen. “For example, in Elisa’s own network in Finland, the software actively monitors and tests the network, making more than two million tests and 2,000 changes on daily basis. Less resource-intensive manual work is required and the existing investments can be fully utilized.”

“With Elisa’s approach offering unlimited data plans to subscribers, its networks carry a high volume of mobile data, meaning it has focused on optimising network performance and getting maximum value out of its existing equipment,” said Santiago Madruga, head of Telco and ICT EMEA at Red Hat. “Thanks to this drive, it has developed innovative SON capabilities. We are proud to collaborate closely with Elisa to deliver SON on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.”

This is obviously a PR coup for Red Hat too, especially since, in its briefing documents, Elisa speaks about having tried various off-the-shelf vendor SON solutions but couldn’t find anything that did the job well enough. This is also yet another example of operators growing frustrated with the vendor community and taking more ownership of overcoming their technological challenges themselves, and now Elisa has a product it can sell on to other operators too.