Botswana Telecommunications Corporation (BTC) has engaged French company Infovista to test, benchmark and improve performance delivered on its mobile network ahead of plans to roll out a 5G network.

BTC operates nationwide 4.5G / LTE-Advanced network, and believes that arrangement will ensure quality experience for subscribers using connected services such as BTC Smega mobile money.

The telco selected Infovista’s TEMS Pocket, TEMS Paragon, TEMS Discovery and Planet products.

Infovista has also collaborated with MOZARK, which specialises in enhancing digital experience quality, to address BTC’s crowdsourced data requirements.

MOZARK’s network testing solution 5GMARK for Enterprise will gather data from BTC’s applications and network, for analysis by the data visualisation tool MAG-M.

Synthetic testing, end-to-end automation and on-field infrastructure enable the report and diagnostic platform to monitor and identify failure points in any digital journey.

BTC’s General Manager Technology, Peter Olyn said MOZARK’s crowdsourced data maps will assist BTC engineers in visualising network performance, informing decision-making around planning future network investments in Planet, and highlighting areas that require drive testing with TEMS.

Olyn said planning, deploying, and boosting a network presents significant logistic and operational challenges, and this is where Infovista can add value. “As we prepare to deploy 5G, we are confident that the combination of Infovista’s planning and network testing solutions gives us the capabilities we need to seamlessly and cost-effectively deploy and enhance our 4.5G network and continue to deliver the best possible quality of experience to our customers.”

He said the initiative will enable advanced automation of network testing and crowdsourced data collection as well as AI-powered RF planning to optimise BTC’s network.