A day with the 'Can you hear me now?' guy

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Have you ever wondered what a typical day is like for the Verizon Wireless test guy?

You know, the one in the TV ads who walks around with a swarm of technicians asking into his cell phone, “Can you hear me now?”

In actuality, there are 98 of those testers. And they don’t walk -- each one drives a Chevy Blazer or Ford Taurus equipped with $300,000 worth of testing gear, cell phones and data cards (see pictures), as many as eight antennae and two GPSs to assess the quality and performance of 1 million coverage miles of the Verizon Wireless network.

These engineers conduct more than 3 million voice call attempts and 16 million data tests annually. But it’s not just the Verizon Wireless network they’re testing: They assess the quality of competitors’ networks -- Cingular, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile and -Cricket -- as well.

“We test well enough to know how everyone stacks up,” says Jack Brandes, Verizon Wireless associate engineer, baseline network, for upstate New York. “You can’t manage it if we didn’t measure it, and we measure it all the time.”

Network World spent an afternoon here with Brandes driving around on a few of the preselected routes that make up the 6,042 miles of such coverage testing routes in upstate New York. The routes are determined based on Department of Transportation reports of areas with the top 10% of traffic in each county.

Not once did Brandes ask into his cell phone, “Can you hear me now?”

Instead, he had two laptop computers in his front passenger seat firing off .WAV file voice clips enunciating intriguing statements such as, “These days, a chicken leg is a rare dish,” or “The jacket hung on the back of the wide chair.”

Such phrases are meant to provide the testing system with a large number of vowel and consonant juxtapositions with which to calculate a mean opinion score (MOS) to measure fidelity, Brandes says. Each outgoing call lasts 2.5 minutes and is tabulated as either a successful call, an ineffective attempt (blocked call) or a lost or dropped call.

The performance data is collected, compiled and presented in Verizon Wireless’ switching facility in nearby Rochester, N.Y., before it’s added to a nationwide performance database in Bedminster, N.J.

An area with a coverage gap or consistently dropped calls doesn’t necessarily mean a new cell tower has to go up. It may mean an existing tower needs to be adjusted or repositioned, or that it should receive a power boost.

It also indicates whether Verizon Wireless should add capacity or expand coverage.

A peek into the Verizon Wireless truck

The bed of the Chevy Blazer holds scanners and analyzers from Comarco Wireless Technology. For voice, each Comarco scanner houses phones from Samsung, Nokia, Motorola and Kyocera, which work with one or another operator’s network -- including Sprint Nextel’s iDEN service.

For data, the Comarco systems push 1MB FTP and HTTP files through Verizon Wireless, Sprint and Cingular networks using data cards supplied by Sierra Wireless. The vehicle tests Cingular’s EDGE technology as well as CDMA 1xRTT, and EV-DO Rev 0 and Rev A networks from Sprint and Verizon Wireless.