NSN Helps Reducing Irrelevant Blackberry Signaling

 

Nice story by Vijay Sankaran (picture) from NSN about the infamous "keep alive"/signaling problem and how NSN's Service Assurance solution and configuring the SGSN while using the Subscriber Data Management solution solved it.

Some background - "NSN: Android and Blackberry Phones Overload Networks with Signaling" - here.

"The operator was puzzled when they started seeing a huge increase in signalling traffic, at a much faster growth rate than had been observed previously.  The growth was so rapid that it very quickly threatened network stability, so something had to be done fast ..  It turns out that, unlike other handsets, BlackBerries are pre-programmed to connect to the network and to look for email updates automatically, whether they have an active data plan provisioned for them or not.  And this makes tons of sense for those people who buy BlackBerries to stay up to date with their mobile email.  But this operator’s “BlackBerry with no data plan” offering had attracted a lot of SMS users who wanted a keyboard but weren’t planning on connecting to the internet."

"How did the operator fix it?  Two steps:  first of all, by creating an attractive, targeted data plan for these recent BlackBerry acquirers and marketing it to these customers directly (we used our Campaign Management solution to do this).  Second, by identifying which users had BlackBerry models and configuring the SGSN (Signalling Gateway) to ignore signalling coming from those handsets if they had no associated data plan (this was done with our Subscriber Data Management solution)."

See post - "Always sell BlackBerry with a data plan!" - here.