Mosaik Solutions: from roaming guides to GIS and core analytics

Recently I spoke with Mosaik Solutions’ John Gilmer, VP, Data Integrity, Brian McNamara, product manager, Todd Cotts, director, Product Management and Matt Oak, manager GIS department regarding their business and recent announcements.

Mosaik Solutions Coverage

Since I spoke with Mosaik Solutions, the company has made the following announcements:

• Mosaik announces the acquisition of TowerSource, a vertical asset database containing North American tower site location information, enhancing its offerings for site planning strategies
• Mosaik enters the wireless test & measurement market with its exclusive licensing deal for XenSurvey, a leading cloud network analytics platform. With this deal, Mosaik will offer the XenSurvey app that enables telecom professionals to measure and compare the performance of mobile and wireless networks at any given location, without the need for expensive equipment.

Mosaik Solutions MarketRight

Mosaik Solutions opened its doors nearly 26 years ago when they began developing roaming guides, at the beginning of cellphone usage, said Gilmer. As they were collecting data for maintaining the guides, customers requested they also make marketing coverage guides. When everything went electronic in the early 2000s, Mosaik began to offer coverage information in geospatial format with a MapInfo product.

Now they offer that same information in Esri shapefiles as well for traditional mobile wireless operators such as Verizon and AT&T, as well as wireless coverage for internet service providers.

“GIS tools are great for those who have the knowledge to use them,” said McNamara. “However, we developed a product aimed more at the design GIS user, but has some of the core analytics and visualizations with our data and combine with other data sets. That product is now MapELEMENTS, based on code that our team wrote, that leverages several different platforms. Today we create marketing maps for operators. We have a product called CellMaps, an interactive web mapping platform that operators put on their website to display information to clients.”

Today Mosaik uses many different platforms. “The data we provide in raw format can be in MapInfo format or shapefile format. The services we provide that are hosted services like MapELEMENTS run on Open Source,” said Cotts. “The base map is OpenStreetMap data, and some tie ins with Esri provide geocoding services, terrain data, and satellite data.”

Mosaik Solutions MapELEMENTS

MapELEMENTS is a web-based SaaS platform. There is no installation required by customers. Customers can search by location, market or county. Settings tab allows for cool features including shared session, ability to upload POIs, infrastructure module or tower locations, and adding to a mapping session.

Customers can choose a standard base map in OpenStreetMap, can also choose from satellite hybrid maps, and use the data with an infrastructure module.

MapELEMENTS is designed to be a tool to be used by company employees, all the way from the CEO to roaming teams to network management teams to customer service, and they don’t need a GIS background. Most people can quickly figure out to navigate this solution.

“We update coverage patterns on a quarterly basis for our GIS , we do offer 4G on a monthly basis for LTE networks,” said McNamara. “The MapELEMENTS platform itself is updated more frequently. Typically every two weeks, but not every coverage pattern is going to be every two weeks.”

Using up to seven Android smartphones, carriers can conduct drive tests to see how their network compares with the competition and measure signal strength, downlink and uplink speeds, and latency. Users can test the network as often as every two minutes, every 30 minutes or at longer intervals. The data lets network testers get a more complete picture of the network over time, CEO Bryan Darr said in an interview with FierceWireless, adding that users can do drive tests or see how a fixed location in the network with highly concentrated congestion performs over time.

Darr said, tower companies and cell-site providers can load the data into Google Earth and recommend to carriers that they need towers in a particular area because of weak signal strength.

Maps show tower locations, as well as competitors’ tower locations. “This was a huge addition from some of our infrastructure prospects and clients who wanted to make sure they were able to upload their towers and to be able to compare their coverage or their location with all the other coverage, both here in the U.S. and internationally. They can see if they’re industy leaders, they can see where other carriers are located, they can see where the industry leaders are located so they can understand where they need to expand and build out their infrastructure to compete accordingly.”

Tags: ArcGIS, cloud, crowdsourcing, data, ESRI, geospatial, Google, imagery, Infrastructure, intelligence, location, mapping, maps, satellite imagery

Categories: ArcGIS, ArcGIS Online, asset management, climate change, cloud, cloud network analytics, conversion, Esri, field GIS, geocoding, geospatial, image-delivery software, lidar, location based sensor fusion, location based services, location intelligence, mapping, mobile, photogrammetry, satellite imagery, sensors, wireless networks

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