Best-ever telecommunication KPIs during Hajj

Hajj, centered round the Holy City of Mecca, is a prime event in the Islamic calendar, and making a pilgrimage to Mecca is the duty of every able-bodied Muslim who has the means to do so. This makes it the largest annual pilgrimage in the world, and the five days of Hajj 1430, held from November 25 to 29 2009, drew over 2.5 million pilgrims from around the globe - all concentrated into an area of only five square kilometers.

The sheer mass of pilgrims attending Hajj, and the huge scale of the rituals involved, mean that careful planning, particularly the use of crowd control techniques and how the rituals are carried out, is crucial in avoiding serious accident hazards. Furthermore the task of planning for and providing the myriad services that cater for the wellbeing of the pilgrims is gigantic and must be initiated well in advance.

Hajj brings with it a huge increase in telecommunications traffic that requires equally careful advance planning. Today, pilgrims utilize telecommunications, particularly mobile telephony services, extensively during this period. They not only want to share the experience with other pilgrims attending Hajj, they want to express their joy to their loved ones back home, and given that the pilgrims come from all parts of the world - well over one hundred countries - this places a heavy burden on the mobile network, with over 1.6 million international subscribers using network services.

The services demanded range from voice and text messaging through to video, the demand for which is growing strongly due to the desire of families back home to see, and therefore to witness, what the pilgrims are doing. The scale can perhaps be best expressed through the 1.6 billion voice calls and 1.2 billion text messages sent during the five days of Hajj - easily the world's highest traffic density.

Preparing with a trusted partner

Although the telecommunications infrastructure for Hajj is composed of many interlocking elements, each and every one being crucial in its own right, there is one overall element that has ensured success over the years - STC has partnered with Nokia Siemens Networks for years to create a highly experienced team of experts who plan and roll out each Hajj telecommunications infrastructure in good time. This has been such a model of good organizational practice and forward planning that before the Beijing Olympics, specialists from China specifically visited STC to benefit from the experience gained in building a telecommunications network that can handle the traffic generated through the influx of millions of people.

As Mr. Walid Al Khelewi, GM Deputy for Network Operations at STC comments "Nokia Siemens Networks have shown a continuous improvement in their services year after year. The support that we are getting from them is great, and has made this possible."

Meticulous planning

Nokia Siemens Networks does not, of course, only supply planning and infrastructure support for Hajj. It has a long and mutually beneficial history of cooperation with the Saudi Telecommunication Company, and indeed supplies many of the base stations and infrastructure for the company's other operations in Saudi Arabia.

The transitory nature of the Hajj, however, does require an extra meticulous level of planning and execution. When it comes to improving overall performance, however, another philosophy is needed - the team treats every Meticulous planning single year as a completely new challenge. Their activities this year included, for example, the testing of Hajj radio capacity to detect and rectify possible quality issues and verification of all A-interface speech and signaling circuits, during which all mismatches were cleared. Exhaustive drive test routines were executed in all Hajj coverage areas to simulate subscriber movement and behavior, and intersystem operability between UMTS and GSM network layers was finetuned.

In addition, EDGE usage was expanded to an additional 40 sites covering Hajj, while HSL (highspeed signaling links) were upgraded to bring 100% coverage to the Muzdalifah and Arafat areas.

Everything under control

Hajj 1430 was served by an impressive array of hardware consisting of a total of 39 BSCs, 1853 BTSs and 13311 TRXs, controlled from a single network operations center manned by Nokia Siemens Networks optimization and CARE teams on a 24/7 rotating shift basis. The operational staff was backed up by product line support on STC premises for the duration of Hajj.

The rapid response of the network operations center was quickly proven when heavy rain and flooding caused BTS outage due to power failure. Mr. Al-Khelewi remembers "we dealt with this promptly by placing alternative power sources - things were smooth and nobody noticed this from the customer point of view.”

However the true performance of this Nokia Siemens Networks solution can best be seen in the improvement of all of the key performance indicators, best highlighted by the call setup success rate of 94.99%.

Mr. Al-Khelewi notes with satisfaction "the Nokia Siemens Networks contribution is their expertise, their equipment and their practices and processes."