Phase 5: Maintenance
Following are some high level guidelines for setting up maintenance for DAS
SLA Documents:
SLA stands for service level agreement and this is at the heart of a maintenance agreement with a vendor. This agreement basically dictates how quickly you want the maintenance vendor to respond to a troubleshooting event.
2 factors primarily dictate the configuration of SLA:
Dependency of your business on mobile service. For example, SLA for a hospital where mobile phone is critical part of daily function will have much more stringent SLA than a resort where the mobile phone is not the critical device of communication – although the resort may disagree – but that’s a different story.
Nature of the service disruption: Response time in SLA is also dictated by the nature of the event or service disruption – is the whole system down? That will be a critical event. You would want the maintenance vendor to respond in a relatively short period of time. If portion of the DAS is down that could be a major event, and that may have a different SLA. You get the idea.
Setting up a trouble ticket process:
Once a complaint comes up, how do you determine if the problem is related to the DAS and not related to user’s device? How and when do you escalate an issue to the carrier? A good trouble ticket process vets these issues early and manage the routing, tracking and resolution of a complaint.
Select maintenance vendor and sign agreement:
Once you have an idea of what kind of SLA you want to set up you can now use that document as a tool for selecting the vendor and setting up a price.
Set up remote monitoring:
All DAS 2.0 & 3.0 platforms we have discussed allows vendors to monitor the DAS remotely. Standard set up is adding a modem and a router to the data controller via the internet service provider.
Set up frequency of health check:
This is usually part of the SLA or vendor agreement. Even if you don’t have a maintenance vendor and agreement in place it’s not a bad idea to periodically conduct a health check on the DAS. This is part of preventive maintenance.
Once a maintenance process & vendor is set up, a well-built DAS should not need daily check up. A maintenance program equipped with a good preventive maintenance program can keep you head-ache free for a long time.
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