By Shailesh Shukla, VP & GM, SWAG Global, Cisco

Overview
The surging demand for data, and the continued growth of Smartphones consumption forces mobile service providers expand their network in order to provide Quality of Experience and Quality of service to their customers. As a result their network becomes more complex and difficult to manage. Leading Lights Awards has recognized the Cisco Quantum SON Suite as the leading solution and "Best Mobile Product" for 2013, to automatically manage the already complex network from a single point, without extra equipment and guaranting KPI's?

What is the Cisco Quantum SON?
Cisco's Quantum self-optimizing network (SON) orchestrates automatically the numerous elements that comprise Radio Access Networks. Our SON harmonizes and optimizes the performance of both UMTS and LTE technologies, across macro and small cells levels, and between various vendors. It facilitates the activation of new sites automatically, it improves performance dramatically, it provides a superior customer experience for both data and voice services, and it opens for operators a variety of ways to utilise the intelligence gathered in their radio network -and profit from it. Our SON is crucial for operators that face the surge in the demand for mobile capacity and the complexity of technologies that are being deployed to answer this demand. Our SON glues them all together in a well synchronised holistic architecture.

How is our SON differentiated from what is in the market today?
Cisco has built the market's most comprehensive SON solution, from its best-of-breed mobile core products to its market leading Wi-Fi offering, and bolstered it with the acquisitions of Intucell,  the recognised SON  technology leader with the world's largest installed base, and Ubiquisys, the market leader in small cells software. These and other Cisco components works as a single whole to answer any SON deployment scenario  -from solving specific performance pains, to stitching together a complete architecture of complex multi-vendor heterogenous networks. Cisco's SON performance is second to none, with 10-40% improvement in KPIs such as call retainability, load and throughput. And unlike other competing solutions, Cisco's SON has been field-proven extensively in the world's largest and most complex networks.

How does our SON help Service Providers save on costs?
Cisco's SON saves OPEX through automating engineering-intensive tasks, sharply reducing the need for drive tests and other manual optimization practices and lowering the load on support centers thanks to automatic healing of problems even before subscribers become aware of them. It also saves CAPEX through dramatic improvement in network performance that postpones and even cancels the need for expansions.  Cisco's SON also reduces the costs of new equipment deployment, as it allows plug&play connections of new nodes and dramatically shortens the time it takes for them to become operational. Above all, the accumulation of performance improvements and smoother network operation leads to superior customer experience and this in turn helps operators to reduce churn.

Summary
Our SON answers complexity with simplicity. It is modular, multi-vendor -multi technology and offers mobile service providers to run their RAN automatically, dynamically and in real time turning their network into a elastic intelligent network

More Information
http://www.cisco.com/go/quantum

 Leading Lights Awards 2013