ABSTRACT Mobile telephony and internet services have become the fastest growing business in the telecommunication market.

At the same time, competition is becoming increasingly fierce in the Telecom industry with accelerated development of new technologies, applications, and services. Nowadays, Telecom operators focus on deploying data network sites to address the overall business transition brought about by IP-based networks, mobility and networks convergence. Statistics from Huawei Technologies Magazine , Communicate Beyond Technology, issued December 2011, has shown that Africa is still behind in accumulating revenue from data services than voice services in the data explosion era. Despite more mobile operators focus on expanding data infrastructures to meet high data demand on the market; they face challenges to meet high standard quality in order to quench customers satisfaction in data services as well as delivery of better services while striving to generate more revenue returns. The new dawn of mobile data services explosion era in Telecom industry has not left Telecom Networks Malawi, a pioneer in Mobile Telecommunications Industry in Malawi from building the right network infrastructure of 2.5G and 3G network in its network. In addition, TNM is on way out to focus in detail on the proper monetization and profitability of mobile broadband through offerings of attractive handsets at cheaper price like Edios, Huawei E26, and data bundle promotions, as an important opportunity to drive the data new revenue, usage, profits in operators data business. However, this project proposal will focus much on mobile data accessibility and usage experienced by TNM customers while implementing a smart care database for reporting and recording customer data related issues registered by customer care agents.

INRTODUCTION The evolution of GSM and WCDMA technologies with the widespread of smart phones, blackberry services, and Internet capable handsets on the market has leveraged high demand for mobile data services exploring present mobile operators with a unique opportunity to generate new revenue streams and grow their business. Recently, mobile data services have outrun the traditional mechanism of data transfer through a short message service (SMS) from end to end, that is between subscribers in the GSM network. Moreover, with the evolution of smart phones, blackberry, etc on the Telecom market, most people prefer to communicate to their peers through the modern technology of using facebook, twitter, Skype, instant messaging, and multimedia messaging and so on. Nowadays, subscribers are privileged to use video call conferencing, You Tube service and share video clips, pictures, files, audios and many more through 2G, 3G and WCDMA network. However, the rapidly increasing data traffic demand has not yet yielded adequate financial returns for operators. Data revenue has grown significantly more slowly than traffic and mobile data services are much less profitable than voice. It is this high demand in traffic and data market revenues that mobile operators have resolved in building more data infrastructure and explore new strategies of generating more revenue to compensate the dying revenue from voice services. General Packet Radio Service(GPRS) is a packet oriented mobile data service on the 2G, 3G and WCDMA cellular communication systems Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) maintained by the 3rd Generation Partnerships Project (3GPP), to transmit IP packets to external networks such as Internet. The GPRS network was integrated into GSM Release 97 (R97) where the maximum packet data download speed was very low, and the version release went on to R99, R4 where circuit switching domain changed to Next Generation. The releases continued to R7 with a maximum download speed of 28Mbps and upload speed of 11mbps The GPRS system forms an integral part of the GSM network switching subsystem with the following services ; multimedia messaging service (MMS), Push to talk over cellular (POC) , Instant Messaging (IMS), Wireless application Protocol and many more. With the aforementioned GSM technology releases, most operators are on the forerun to deploy intelligent infrastructures in their network to provide maximum download speed of 28Mbps and more, to their prominent subscribers.

Telecom Networks Malawi (TNM), a pioneer of the Mobile Telecommunications Industry in Malawi, embraced 3G and WCDMA technology in 2009 with over 100 data networks sites deployed in the network. TNM offers video call conferencing, data bundle promotions, popularly known as mtolo, MMS, WAP, BlackBerry services etc over mobile handsets. Despite developments, competition in data markets and revenue returns, TNM faces challenges in identifying the potential bottlenecks in data networks and ascertain other major problems experienced by its prominent customers. This project proposal focuses on highlighting user experience in data network accessibility and reporting, recording tools of customer related data issues registered by customer care agents. In this project, a Smart care database built upon SQL, Oracle and PHP database languages will be implemented where packet data engineers will login the user client and access customer data issues registered by customer care agents. At the end of the month, report will be issued to Planning and Optimization team to optimize the network.

OBJECTIVES Principal Objective The main objective of this project is to identify potential bottlenecks in the TNM Packet data network and ascertain bandwidth allocation per subscriber at different times, and improve the reporting tool of customer data related issues in TNM network. Minor Objectives To analyze data consistency flow during the browsing session To analyze data charging and billing mechanism if they tally to the given tariffs To improve the reporting, recording tool of customer issues as far as data services are concerned.

CASE OF STUDY The project will indulge in the case of study in the major areas of main concern highlighted below: Data Network coverage: In this case study, attention will be on the urban sites to access mobile data attach session management. This means that, it will centralize on the mobility management. Is the data flow continuous if the subscriber moves from one site to another without noticing any delays and anything due to the movement made. In other words, does the subscriber lose the data session due to poor handover between sites or poor signal detection. Data Session Setup Management In this case study, much focus will be on the browsing aspect. How much time does it to take to upload the website and time taken to download files. In short, it highlights the data session setup management. Data Billing and Charging flow This involves at analyzing data charging aspect, if at all the subscriber is billed and charged accordingly either on postpaid or prepaid customer account. Management of Data customer issues This involves at analyzing the reporting, recording tools of customer data related issues in the Network and how the Planning and Performance team capitalize the reported issues for optimization proceedings.

LITERATURE REVIEW The evolution and growth of the Mobile Internet is fundamentally changing the way users access the Internet. End users are consuming content and services in new ways (such as overthe-top [OTT] and offnet), across new devices (such as Smartphone, netbooks, e-readers, and tablet computers), and interacting with other users in ways that only mobile networks can provide. Wired Magazine's September 2010 cover story, "The Web is Dead," cites a study by Morgan Stanley that forecasts, "the number of users accessing the Net from mobile devices will surpass the number who access it from PCs" within the next five years. The applications on the rise,

accounting for more and more of the traffic on the Internet, include "peer-to-peer file transfers, email, company VPNs, the machine-to-machine (M2M) communications of APIs, Skype calls, online games, Xbox Live, iTunes, VoIP phones," and so on. In a recent research report by Change Wave Research in 2009, asking what subscription service a user would be willing to give up, respondents were subscribers are 15 times more likely to give up television service than cell phone service (see Figure 2), with only 3 percent saying they would be willing to give up cell-phone usage.

It is evident that the mobile subscriber base is reaching a saturation point for voice. On the other hand, mobile data is growing exponentially. This trend is stimulated by the rise of highbandwidth mobile applications and increasingly powerful Smartphone devices that can access these new applications. As a result, mobile data traffic is growing dramatically. The 2010 Cisco Visual Networking Index Mobile Data Forecast found that global mobile data traffic increased 160 percent between 2008 and 2009. The forecast predicts that global mobile data traffic will grow by a factor of 39 between 2009 and 2014, for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 108 percent. This growth in mobile data traffic, however, barely offsets decreased wireless voice revenue resulting from flat-rate, unlimited plans, according to earnings releases from leading mobile operators. Mobile operators have long enjoyed high operating margins due to the revenue-permegabyte received from a largely voice-dominated traffic model. The shift to a data-dominant model is forecast to continue to deflate mobile operator margins quite significantly, with revenues dropping from US$0.43 per MB to approximately $0.02 per MB in 2014, according to a 2010 study by Bernstein Research

Much has been written about mobile data services and GPRS network, yet the overall picture of its network architecture remains unveiled. Below is the brief description of GPRS network architecture.

Questionnaire

UMTS R4 Core Network Structure

CS Domain
GSM /GPRS BSS BSC BTS IP/ATM Backbone
MGW MGW

PSTN/PLMN

VMSC Server GMSC Server HLR/AuC SS7 SCE SMS

Iu-CS
PCU RNC

SCP NodeB

Iu-PS
SGSN

UTRAN

GPRS backbone
GGSN BG

FW

Internet, Intranet

PS Domain

CG

FW

Other PLMN

(Describe in detail the architecture and roles of main parts of packet data) METHODOLOGY In partial fulfillment of the project, the following methodologies will be undertaken to accomplish the goals of this project Information Data Collection Site coverage in Blantyre urban and TNM Data network architecture will be collected from TNM Engineering Division office. The project will be much interested in carrying out its survey within Blantyre urban sites where 2G and 3G network sites are deployed. Five sites will be chosen to conduct our survey on how different people perceive TNM internet services as well as conducting performance tests on data attach session and mobility management in general. Performance Tests Data network connectivity ( insert the signaling flow happens in mobility management)

Data session setup management ( insert signaling flow happens during data session setup during browsing period) Data charging and billing types

Smart care Database Tool Database will be developed using SQL, Oracle and PHP tools to improve the recording, reporting and management of data related customers issues in TNM network.