The real coverage holes, sorted from the noise

Rachel is a radio network planner at a big mobile operator in Singapore. Weak signal complaints reach her in a spreadsheet, a week late, mixed with outages fixed long ago. She can’t tell a real coverage hole from a bad afternoon. So antennas go where people shout loudest, and customers wait days for an answer. With xMap Flows, Rachel built Sonar. When a signal complaint lands in the support sheet, Sonar checks that address against the network’s outage list, and if it is an outage, tells the customer when it will be fixed, or, if not, adds it to Rachel’s map of real coverage holes. In three weeks, Sonar answers four hundred customers within minutes, and puts a hundred and twenty real complaints on Rachel’s map. They cluster around new tower blocks in Punggol and Tampines. Her next six antennas go exactly there. Rachel used to plan by the loudest complaints. Now she plans by the weakest signal.

The story in words