Tutela provides crowd-sourced mobile quality data to mobile telecoms companies to help them analyze network coverage and quality of experience. Tutela harnesses the power HEAVY.AI's telecom analytics solution within its Tutela Explorer product as an OEM.

“We quickly discovered how intuitive and easy to use Heavymmerse is for visual analytics.”

Geospatial Analytics in Telecommunication Network Operations

Tutela Technologies, Ltd. (Tutela) provides crowdsourced mobile quality data to mobile telecoms companies to help them to analyze network coverage, quality of experience, and make improvements and related investment decisions. Tutela harnesses the power of HEAVY.AI's telecom analytics solution within its Tutela Explorer product as an OEM.

Tutela was not the first company to collect network performance data from mobile handsets. Numerous speed test applications provide network quality data to telecom providers, but they are all limited to collecting data from users who have installed those specific apps, and only when a user runs a speed test application. This severely limits the size and consistency of the data collected.

“Tutela disrupts that space by embedding data crowdsourcing code inside popular mobile applications installed on hundreds of millions of consumer devices to collect exponentially more data than has been available previously, without bias,” says Hunter MacDonald, Founder and CEO of Tutela.

Tutela’s software development kit (SDK) is loaded onto a variety of popular third-party mobile applications, including games, utilities, entertainment, and weather apps. This kit collects anonymized network information and metrics and reports it back to Tutela throughout the day, resulting in more data, better coverage, and higher confidentiality.

Tutela is now reporting on over 250 million mobile handsets globally, exceeding the company’s goals for data ingest. But this has created a new big data challenge: storing, processing and analyzing vast amounts of network data at the scale and velocity of modern telecom operations. “We experienced an exponential growth of data over a short time, following the launch of our mobile app partner program,” says Tom Luke, VP of WW Sales and Partnerships at Tutela.

This data overwhelmed Tutela’s existing data analysis and business analysis applications, which couldn’t effectively manage data at this scale. Data scientists would spend hours pre-aggregating the data, visualizing it, then running additional queries overnight. This dramatically slowed the company’s time to insight and inhibited the Tutela sales team from effectively demonstrating telecom network analytics insights during customer meetings.

“I would open our dashboards during a customer demonstration but these were painfully slow to load and navigate. This rarely made for an effective demo in front of our prospective customers,” adds Tom. “Potential customers would see the 'loading' spinning circles and start to lose interest.”

Choosing a SQL-Engine for Scale

To work with its massive and growing data, Tutela sought new telecom analytics software for presenting data to its clients, and the company soon discovered HEAVY.AI's accelerated analytics platform. Tutela immediately saw an opportunity to reduce time to insight from hours and days to seconds.

“Data is our business,” explains Tom. “Other companies use data, but our core business is collecting and processing mobile network quality data and making it available to our customers in the most convenient and flexible way possible. We needed a solution that could scale with our business.”

“Nobody wants to write a SQL query and come back two hours later to get an answer. They want to be able to manipulate data and navigate data in real-time,” Hunter explains. To that end, Tutela chose HEAVY.AI for its SQL-engine, which provides the speed necessary to gain insights from this massive volume of data, over 10 billion measurements daily, without pre-aggregation, downsampling or loss of granular detail.

Successful Adoption and Unexpected Revenue Streams

Tutela first adopted HEAVY.AI to explore over 10 petabytes daily to provide detailed reports to its customers: major telecom providers over three continents. These reports were all based on anonymized mobile network quality data, and provided detailed, six month analysis of network signal strength, download speeds, signal-to-noise ratio, quality, and device locations.

These crowdsourced reports are invaluable to telecom providers, who continually seek ways to improve customer service and satisfaction, optimize network performance, and identify new opportunities for growing revenue. Reports that took a day to prepare were now taking minutes, with new levels of granularity that helped Tutela’s customers discover valuable business insights.

Yet the extreme query speed of the HeavyDB SQL engine was only the part of the transformation for Tutela. “We quickly discovered how intuitive and easy to use HEAVY.AI Immerse is for visual analytics. That opened up a completely new opportunity for Tutela and our customers,” adds Tom.

With interactive visualization, Tutela recognized an even bigger opportunity. The company embarked on its second use of HEAVY.AI: offering self-service analytics to its clients. “By combining HeavyImmerse with our data, processing and services we were able to productize an integrated, powerful business intelligence solution for our customers, called Tutela Explorer,” says Tom. “Our customers frequently comment on how intuitive the platform is to use. That led to our biggest shift: we use HeavyImmerse as an OEM product. It’s generating revenue for us and huge value for our customers.”

Tutela began reselling HeavyImmerse because of the value and simplicity that it provides to their customers. The company performs the initial setup on its servers, then provides a customized, interactive dashboard online, with a login and password. From a technical standpoint, it expedites the setup time for customers and simplifies the entire process. Tutela customers are up and running quickly, with the interactive visualization and telecom analytics solutions they need to optimize the performance of its network.

“[HEAVY.AI] is generating revenue for us and huge value for our customers.”

Future Opportunities Providing Advanced Analytics as a Service

Tutela is making many more plans with HEAVY.AI, collaborating on new features for the joint solution. The company is now combining massive datasets and, with the extreme speed of HEAVY.AI, offering new types of insights that bring even more value to its clients.

“What we’re doing now is letting a company drill into any geographic area, like a financial district, and analyse network performance and quality, see who has the best network speeds, and why, so they can make improvements to their own networks. This helps our telecom customers make critical decisions around planning, operations and marketing strategy which enables them to provide a better service to mobile users. We’re able to drill down to look at the performance of individual cell towers or connection technologies in seconds, with the granularity that’s available in the data with the performance delivered by HEAVY.AI,” asserts Tom.

Tutela and HEAVY.AI continue to deepen their relationship, regularly providing input to improve HeavyImmerse for its own telecom uses and those of other telco users. And of course, HEAVY.AI channels Tutela’s suggestions on HeavyDB back into the open source code, making those available to HEAVY.AI users across all industries.

Download the full telecom analytics case study.

About Tutela

Tutela Technologies, Ltd. (Tutela), is a Canadian crowdsourced mobile data company with offices in Victoria, British Columbia and London, England. The company was founded in 2011 and provides location-based mobile insights to major telecom and mobile industry businesses to improve network coverage, quality of service, and related resource investment decisions.