Ranlytics announces automated saturation RF drive testing

Ranlytics launches support for saturation RF drive testing with Lura™, the industry’s first zero-touch, fully autonomous RF measurement device capable of being deployed on fleet vehicles to accurately and frequently measure every operator-band combination at every address – in a city, or an entire country.  At the lowest unit cost in the industry.

We’ve complemented Lura™ with a suite of innovative cloud-based data processing, storage and analysis tools that eliminate processing bottlenecks, reduce costs significantly, and that make all of your historic drive test data instantly available for querying, retrieval, visualisation and analysis.  

The engineering grade RF measurement data collected by the fleet of Lura™ data collectors in industry standard QMDL file format is automatically uploaded to, and processed in, the Ranlytics cloud, and then stored in a proprietary cloud database.  The cumbersome and resource-intensive storage, logging, management and processing of large numbers of QMDL log files is eliminated.  You’ll have full access to all measurement data on the day that it is collected, and every day thereafter.

Screenshot of the Ranlytics workbench GUI showing address-level LTE received power levels for one operator measured by Lura™ collectors installed on fleet vehicles in Newcastle, NSW Australia.  The pie chart at right shows the proportions of the mapped area in which coverage is classified as Best (green), Good (yellow), Poor (orange), Bad (Red) and No coverage (Black).  Black spots and areas of very poor coverage are evident on the map.

Screenshot of the Ranlytics workbench GUI showing a street level comparison between 2 operators’ LTE coverage.  The pie chart at right shows the proportions of the mapped area in which the first operator’s coverage is best (ping), those in which the second operator’s coverage is best (yellow), and areas in which both operators’ coverage is equivalent (brown).

In another industry first, the engineering-grade measurement data is accessible to both engineering and non-technical users, creating a ‘single source of truth’ regarding coverage and benchmarking data throughout your organisation, and significantly increasing your ROI.

Screenshot of the Ranlytics engineering workbench GUI showing street level RSRP levels for an operator’s L-1800 band, with a distribution curve at the top right corner, and showing the date selector which allows any user to instantly query, retrieve & compare drive test data collected at any date.

Understanding RF coverage and quality at individual street level has been a long-held goal of the industry globally.  But the cost, complexity, bulk and reliability problems associated with legacy test equipment has prevented this goal from being achieved.  The industry has had no alternative but to rely on sampling-and-interpolation, desktop surveys, and poor-quality crowd sourced data.  And the inevitable result has been incomplete understanding of coverage & quality; non-optimised networks; an inability to identify the location and extent of black spots, micro blackspots & areas of compromised coverage; insufficient information to determine root causes of coverage issues; and of course, inaccurate coverage maps.

Ranlytics developed Lura™, and our complementary suite of data analytics capabilities to address these problems, and to provide the industry with definitive engineering-grade RF measurement data that is more accurate, more frequently updated, and more readily usable than any alternative source of information.

We call this saturation RF drive test data, and it provides unprecedented insight into the performance of cellular networks, and into which operator provides better coverage at any given address.  All on the basis of definitive RF measurement data.

And because all measured data is stored long-term in the Ranlytics cloud, you can, at any time and from any web-connected device, instantly compare coverage at different times at a given location, so that – for the first time – you can immediately see the effects of network changes on the ground, and identify coverage issues resulting from changes to the built or natural environments.

As with all Ranlytics products, reliability and resilience is fundamental in Lura's™ design and engineering.  They’re built to operate reliably on a truly continuous basis, and can be quickly and easily installed on vehicles ranging from technician’s vans to delivery motorcycles to mining trucks.

Ranlytics CTO, Brad McLean says that Lura™ provides the industry with the quantity of high-quality RF measurement data that is needed for the design, optimisation and maintenance of 4G networks, and that’s an absolute must with the deployment of high-band 5G networks.

“Drive testing has always been expensive, time-consuming, resource-intensive, unreliable and complex.  So, it’s never been possible to collect drive test data as extensively as needed, and then to access it quickly and easily.

Lura™ and our data analysis tools introduce much-needed innovation into the market, giving operators, regulators, and customers the actionable data that they need to improve network coverage, and make better informed buying decisions.

Understanding RF coverage and quality is a pre-requisite to optimising and fixing it.  And that in turn is a pre-requisite to improving user experience.  

We believe strongly that giving RF engineers the high-quality coverage data that they need, and the tools to quickly and easily use that data is the single biggest factor in improving outcomes for end users.”

Replace interpolation, desktop projections and poor-quality crowd sourced data with definitive engineering grade RF coverage and quality measurement data, at individual address level.  Design, deploy and optimise networks faster and more efficiently, and identify black spots and areas of compromised coverage quickly to improve customer satisfaction and retention.  

It’s RF re-imagined!