The rollout guys [telecommunications systems integrators]
D. Penn · Communications Engineer · 2005
The author, who has been involved in seven major European installations, describes what systems integrators do for an operator. Systems integrators are an essential part of the telecommunications ecosystem. Both wireline and wireless operators, as well as large corporations, often rely heavily on these players in their efforts to increase capacity, deploy new services or upgrade their infrastructure. So it is not surprising that the variety of skills required by systems integrators is comprehensive. The areas that must be as, or even more, familiar to the system integrator as they are to the carriers themselves include: field and systems engineering; the provision of service analysis; network configuration; RF optimisation; overall resource management. In order to oversee such projects competently, systems integrators and field engineering companies need to be able to manage global operations round the clock. They must be able to guarantee rapid fault resolution for any site in the world to minimise downtime of any network element. The article describes the priorities of the systems integrator.