Optus has flagged a successful completion of a world-first live network trial of near real-time automatic Cell Coverage Compensation technology which is able to identify outages and restore mobile coverage across a live 4G and 5G multi-vendor network.

The telco said that by combining advanced automation with near real-time outage detection, the solution helped minimise service disruption during events such as extreme weather, power failures and planned maintenance activities, enabling customers to stay connected when it matters most.

The trial, conducted on Optus’ live network in Sydney and Brisbane, demonstrated the ability to rapidly detect outages and automatically restore up to 47% of lost coverage footprint and up to 50% of affected mobile connections during planned site outages.

This new capability, powered by Nokia’s MantaRay SON Solution, uses advanced engineering capabilities and algorithms to automatically adjust surrounding network infrastructure to compensate the mobile coverage when a cell site goes offline, helping maintain connectivity and improving network resilience for customers.

The telco said the technology was developed locally by Optus and Nokia, using real-time network triggering events such as cell status changes, environmental alarms, and OSS link supervision alarms.” This enables outages to be detected and addressed within minutes — and in some cases seconds — significantly faster than traditional KPI-based monitoring methods that often take 15 minutes or longer to detect network disruptions,” it said.

Sri Amirthalingam, Optus Chief Technology Officer, said, “Network resilience is fundamental to earning and maintaining our customers’ trust. Whether an outage is caused by severe weather, a power disruption or essential network upgrades, our focus is always on reducing the impact on customers and restoring services as quickly as possible.”