The measurements were performed from November, 28th to the end of December, 8th in drive mode with a high-end modular systems Diversity Benchmarker manufactured by SwissQual AG, equipped with Nokia C5 phones, Sierra Wireless AirCard 503 modems and PCTel Seegull EX scanners. SwissQual Diversity Benchmarker has been designed especially for extreme robustness for QoE and QoS benchmarking drive test in demanding environment. Measurement systems installed in 7 vehicles spent 10 days simultaneously conducting detailed radio, voice and data transmission tests.

Data collection equipment:

5 Voice measurement sets installed in the measurement cars consisting of:

1 x SwissQual Diversity CBM (FW ver 01.08)

1 x SwissQual Diversity PCM (SW ver 10.6.6.8) with PCTel SeeGull

3 x SwissQual Diversity PCM (SW ver 10.6.6.8) with SwissQual Diversity MCM with Nokia C5

2 Data measurement set installed in the measurement cars consisting of:

1 x SwissQual Diversity CBM (FW ver 01.08)

1 x SwissQual Diversity PCM (SW ver 10.6.6.8) with PCTel SeeGull

3 x SwissQual Diversity PCM (SW ver 10.6.6.8) with Sierra Wireless AirCard 503 Data Card

2 Diversity Voice Call Server (with E1 interface)

2 FTP server (delivered by the independent supplier, company RBC)

All the post-processing was made based on SwissQual NQDI 10.6.6.8 post-processing tool and MS SQL tools.

During the tests, more than 32,000 voice calls and 14,000 data connections were made in order to assess the quality of Beeline, Megafon and MTS 3G networks quality across 15 main parameters. The final research report summary covers selected 3G network KPIs including: Voice Cut-off Call Ratio, Voice Service Non-Accessibility, Voice Service Access Time, FTP Mean User Data Rate, FTP IP-Service Access Time and Data Transfer Cut-Off Ratio; all presented below.

Route Map

Voice Services Quality

Voice Service Non-Accessibility represents the ratio between unsuccessful call attempts and all made attempts (both successful and unsuccessful). It is a probability that a subscriber cannot make a call.

Table 1. Voice Service Non-Accessibility

Figure 1. Voice Service Non-Accessibility

Voice Cut-of call ratio represents the ratio between dropped calls and all successfully started calls. It is a probability that a subscriber’s call will be dropped.

Table 2. Voice Cut-off Call Ratio

Figure 2. Voice Cut-off Call Ratio

Voice Service Access Time is time lag between the moment of call initiation to the moment when voice service is activated.

Table 3. Voice Service Access Time

Figure 3. Average Voice Service Access Time [sec]

Data Transfer Quality

FTP Mean User Data Rate is a value of data throughput. It measures the actual speed of data transfer for downloading 10 MB from RBC server.

Table 4. FTP Mean User Data Rate

Figure 4. Average FTP Mean User Data Rate [kbps]

IP-Service Access Time measures time needed to establish network connection to the server (between requests from subscriber equipment and the response).

Table 5. IP-Service Access Time

Figure 5. Average IP-Service Access Time [sec]

Data Transfer Cut-Off Ratio is a probability of subscribers’ internet session disruption.

Table 6. Data Transfer Cut-Off Ratio

Figure 6. Attach Failure Ratio