Requirement for Seamless Mobile Communications during World Cup 2022
1. FOR SEAMLESS MOBILE
COMMUNICATIONS IN 2022
SOCCER WORLD CUP
BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS
JANUARY 17, 2022
2022 WORLD CUP ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
2. Problem Statement
South Africa has been recently chosen to host 2022 soccer World Cup. This is a major global event, that
will gather 32 national teams and their respective delegations, government officials, journalists, team
supporters, tourists, etc. for a whole month, in 16 cities throughout the country. Top officials from the
host country rightfully foresee that event as a unique opportunity to market their fatherland to the World;
thus, they would like to make sure soccer fans and tourists live their best experience during their stay.
Part of that objective includes seamless mobile communications for all, especially with the expected
increase in demand for communication services:
• journalists reporting back to their newsroom,
• tourists making calls to their family/friends,
• football fans sharing pictures on their social media,
• etc.
In this regard, one of the urgent problems that the event’s Organization Committee pointed during initial
coordination meetings is the poor quality of communications on most mobile networks in the country.
The top complaints that have been consistently received by the Telecoms Regulatory Agency since several
months are the following:
• High failed call attempts and call drops,
• poor quality of audio and video calls,
• horrible browsing experience for Mobile Web users,
• Etc.
The Organization Committee has therefore requested the regulatory agency to investigate on those issues
ASAP (in connection with all Telcos) and to provide a solution that will help public authorities to:
• Identify the root cause(s) of the reported issues and solve them,
• Monitor in real-time (or quasi real-time) the network quality, at least for the 16 localities where
the delegations will reside during the event.
After several meetings between Telcos and the regulator, all Telcos still claim that they have always been
monitoring their performance indicators continuously and those appear to be excellent most of the time.
Thus, they can’t do much regarding subscribers’ complaints; to make things worse, some of them are even
doubtful of the effectiveness of quality issues reported by mobile users. There is clearly a communication
deadlock at this point.
As a renowned senior Solutions Architect consultant, you have been called by the Regulatory Agency to
unlock the situation by proposing a technical solution. That solution would help the regulator to:
• have a clear and accurate picture of effective network quality for each Telco, from a subscriber’s
perspective,
• satisfy demands from the Organization Committee and Government for a real-time Network
Quality monitoring tool available for all the main event stakeholders.
The event is happening in exactly 3 months.
3. Annex 1 – Mobile Network Architecture
Figure 1- Typical 4G Network Architecture
Typically, any mobile user with his mobile device on is covered by an Evolved Base Station (EBS). As soon
as he initiates a call, the entire call setup process is triggered by the Evolved Packed Core (EPC) via the
caller EBS, all the way to the destination (through the Serving Gateway (S-GW) if it is a regular Call, or P-
GW if it is Internet Traffic).
If the call setup fails, a standard log file is generated by the EPC, with all the call details and the failure
cause. If the call attempt is successful, the call is connected; once the call is terminated, the EPC generates
a log file with all call details, termination cause, average bit rate during the call (standard call or Internet
call/browsing).
4. Each Telco typically has 1 datacenter in each of the country’s major cities (2 in total), where all the
Evolved Packet Core are located, as well as all the devices that serve for the connection to the Public
Internet. The rest of the cities (14) are connected to either one or the other main Datacenter through a
high speed and redundant Fiber connection.
All the call logs are generated by the EPC and stored in a file Server located in the same datacenter for
long-term lifecycle management. Call logs are typically kept for 18 months in the datacenter before being
subject to deep archiving or even deletion, depending on the Telco.
Figure 2 - Call logs generation and storage
5. Annex 2 – Network Quality Indicators
The following indicators are to be considered for any given base Station:
• (Successful Calls / Overall Call attempts) ratio,
• (Unexpected Call drop / Total number of connected Calls),
• Average speed for a mobile browsing session.
• Average speed for an audio call
• Average speed for a video call
It is assumed that all these details are included in the call logs generated after any given call attempt,
successful or not.
