What does a specialist engineer do?

[laystaa]

Hi,

We've been having some trouble in our area recently & they are sending out a 'specialist engineer' to investigate the issue.

I am just wondering if this engineer would look at people's mobile data traffic logs, etc? What is the process here for them to diagnose the issue?

[Tal]

Hi @laystaa. Thank you for your post. The specialist engineer is a more specialized engineer in network issues where the normal engineer could not locate the issue in the site. They normally check on the sites capacity and the amount of congestion on the site and depending on the issue sometimes pin point dead zones where they can move the site equipment to help fix the dead zones etc, it all depends on the issue they find and the work needed to fix it.

[laystaa]

Right, okay thanks for clarifying. Do they even have the permission/authority to look at individual people's traffic?

I'd imagine it's some kind of aggregated data, right?

[Tal]

You're welcome. They won't have access to individual data information. They'll have access to things like the amount of users on the site, amount of data that uploads or downloads and any failures on the site.

[japitts]

This is a good description of a network optimiser. Sounds like in this case, a Field Engineer can't identify any hardware faults onsite, and the issue is suspected to be traffic-related. Optimisation checks are remote ones.

If a "specialist" is being sent to site, that's most likely to either be a rigging team (if the fault is suspected to be at height/antenna-level), potentially a vendor (although Nokia/Ericsson would normally check remotely first), or just a Field-Ops senior.