Hi Experts,
I’ve spent the last several months working on the data side of RAN : consuming counters, talking to topology/inventory, building dashboards. The more engineers I speak to, the more I realize the real problems aren’t where the product slides say they are. I’d like to learn what those real problems actually look like for you.
I’d really like to hear from people who live with this day to day — RAN engineers, OSS developers, performance folks, NOC teams, optimization teams — on a few questions:
1. What’s still static that really shouldn’t be?
What parameter, threshold, or decision in your network is hardcoded somewhere (a JSON config or anything ) that you know should be adapting based on current conditions — but isn’t?
Examples I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere: neighbor lists, handover offsets, ANR pruning thresholds, load balancing triggers Is this your experience too? What else?
2. What task eats your week that you’re quietly angry about?
The recurring manual work, the thing you’ve done so many times you could script it but can’t because it needs “judgement.” .
3. Data you collect but never use
Which PM counters / CM attributes / event logs are you technically capturing but nobody opens unless there’s an incident? What would have to be true for that data to actually drive a decision?
4. The 3 AM problem
What’s the incident pattern that keeps recurring. Not the one-off, but the same thing, different cell, different night? The one where someone on-call knows exactly what to click because it’s happened before?
Not looking for product pitches or vendor brochure talk. Genuinely want to hear war stories, Slack rants, and “if only someone would fix X” lists. I believe the interesting problems in telco automation aren’t in the glossy demos, they’re in the boring repetitive stuff nobody writes blog posts about.
Whether you’re at Tier 1 operator, a private network, a small rural ISP, or a vendor working alongside ops, please share. Even one honest sentence helps.
Thanks
sam