MTS connected artificial intelligence to planning a mobile communication network

2022: Connecting Artificial Intelligence to Mobile Network Planning

On May 31, 2022, MTS, a Russian company providing digital, media and telecommunications services, announced that it had used artificial intelligence (AI) to plan a mobile network in all regions of Russia. The use of AI technology in analytical data will make it possible to predict the potential profitability of investments in the development of telecom infrastructure in the regions with an accuracy of more than 75 percent and optimize the quality of coverage of territories.

Illustration: tarifok.com

MTS has been using Big Data analytics to build a network since 2017 as part of the Smart Rollout project, which predicts the profitability of base stations and determines effective places for their construction and modernization. Now the company has connected artificial intelligence to this process: MTS AI, a subsidiary of MTS, has implemented AI functions in the Smart Rollout system to predict investment returns.  

AI identifies the features and typical schemes of business functioning in a particular region, testing hypotheses about the potential profitability of the network, for which it analyzes the data collected by Big Data from corporate systems and external sources: technical parameters of load on the network, data transfer rate, needs and behavior of subscribers, places of their concentration, capital and operating costs of the company, strategies of competitors, data on urban planning, development of transport and social infrastructure and many other indicators.  

"It is quite important for MTS telecom business to carefully plan investments in network infrastructure development. The goal of our project is to assess the potential of covering areas mobile communication from the point sight financial of return. We aggregate from information corporate systems and compare them with Big Data analysis. As a result, we get a concentrated set of data from more than 500 metrics. We segment more than 2,200 locations in Russia to identify zones with similar business behavior, combining them into clusters. This approach allows for better train AI models forecasting and identification of the most significant income factors, "- noted the leading developer of the MTS Smart Rollout project Sergey Khaustov.

"Analysis of big data when planning a network in the metropolitan area made it possible to more comprehensively assess the needs of specific locations in communication services and proactively increase the coverage and capacity of the network where necessary. In 2021, thanks to the use of Big Data in the region, we managed to increase the financial return on the built base stations by at least 10% and halve the time for finding effective locations. We expect that the introduction of artificial intelligence into the Smart Rollout system will improve these indicators, "- noted the technical director of MTS in the Moscow region Vladislav Medvedev.

Smart Rollout is a Business Intelligence (BI) solution that combines technologies to achieve business goals using large amounts of data.