7/29/2019 Atoll vs Planet

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Atoll

Current Version 2.8

Company

Forsk (founded in 1987, have been developing

RF planning tools since then). Company

structure stable, same core development team

for a long time who know the software very,

very well. Fast business growth in past 2

years

Profitable every year since foundation,

consistent and stable company

Company activityFocussed on Radio Planning software since

1987. Original developers of Atoll

Type of companyPrivate company still owned and managed by

founders

Product history

Forsk started development of Atoll since 1996.

First Atoll released in 1997. Atoll was the first

commercial UMTS RF planning tool in the

market (Y2000)

OEMs and global

stategic partnerships

Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Vodafone, Motorola,

Nortel. Atoll is now the only RF planning tool

with OEM relationships with equipment

vendors.

Atoll LTE used by all major LTE equipmentvendors

Market share

50% market share in Europe (Turkey included)

#1 in Europe and Asia Pacific

Increasing market share in USA

#1 in UMTS, CDMA, WiMAX and LTE

Recent important replacements of Aircom

Hardware

Recommendations

CPU: dual-core or better

RAM: 2GB or more

Free hard disc space: 10GB +

LanguageGood support of both English and non-English

languages

User friendliness /Ease of use Users report high satisfaction with ease of use

GIS

Developed by Forsk. Specially optimized for

RF calculations and fast change of views

Supports a lot of digital map formats, including

MapInfo, Planet, bil, ArcView

Setup file size and

installation process

Single file, about 50Mb. Easy and quick

installation (less than 5 mins)

GSM/GPRS/EDGE/EDGE+

UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA/HSPA+

CDMA2000 1xRTT/EVDO Rev0/EVDO RevAWiMAX 802.16d/802.16e

LTE

TD-SCDMA

Microwave Links

Microwave Links can be planned standalone

or together with main network

Supported RF

technologies

7/29/2019 Atoll vs Planet

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Atoll

Ease of project data

transfer

Easy. Project data, path loss matrices,

prediction studies and simulation results, even

digital maps can be embedded in one single

.ATL file.

Model calibrationSupport of both CW measurement and Test

Mobile data

Path loss matrices

Calculation resolution can be defined on eachsector basis. Up to 2 path loss matrices (with

individual resolution, radius and propagation

model) supported for each sector

Platform and APIs

Open platform with a lot of APIs (general APIs

to read/write Atoll tables, propagation model

specific API, AFP specific API).

Ease of integration of 3rd party modules/tools.

Large variety of thoird party tools supported:

the most in the industry

Supported RDMS

Relational

Database

Management System)

Oracle, MS SQL Server, MS Access and

Sybase are all supported.

But separate database is NOT required for

standalone usage.

Parallel and

distributed calculation

Support of up to 8 threadings per computer.

Only one license/computer is consumed in

case of multi-threading and multi-core

workstation.

Support of distributed calculation

Support of RF

technology evolution

Policy of considering these as RF technology

module upgrade (i.e. no extra module fee is

needed as long as license in maintenance

Support of ACP

Integration of Atoll ACP module for GSM,

UMTS, WiMAX and LTE

Also support of 3rd party ACP tools, includingCapesso/Aurad, Arieso, Actix WiNES,

Schema etc.

Capesso Greenfield supported

Support Organisation

Very strong regional support office based in

South China, has been supporting Atoll for

more than 6 years. Additional support centre

being created in Delhi, India

7/29/2019 Atoll vs Planet

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Current Version

Company

Company activity

Type of company

Product history

OEMs and global

stategic partnerships

Market share

Hardware

Recommendations

Language

User friendliness /Ease of use

GIS

Setup file size and

installation process

Supported RF

technologies

Planet

5.2

Mentum has patchy profitability over last few years

and have builkt their radio planning tool business by

acquisitions, not organic growth

Radio Planning software only recently (bought Planet

business from Ericsson). Background in transmission

planning software

Substantially owned by Venture Capital

Once the leading GSM RF planning tool, but very

slow development in the past years since the change

of owners: MSI->Marconi->Ericsson->Mentum

None

Exact status not known, but has been damaged in

recent years by uncertainty surrounding company

CPU: 3GHz

RAM: 2GB

Free hard disc space: 200GB(1GB/5 sites)

Chinese not displayed properly ==> How about other

languages?

Users report generally not very easy to use

MapInfo. ==>

- Not efficient on big scale of networks

- slow correction of bugs on GIS.

- direct support of MapInfo .grd and .grc formats.

Need external and manual conversion if Planet

format maps.

A lot of files. Total size >200MB. MapInfo installation

is included. (But if there is MapInfo already installed,

MapInfo has to be removed before installation of

Planet)

GSM,UMTS and CDMA2000/EV-DO/WiMAX/LTEsupported in v5.2.

Microwave Links plannning is supported by another

Mentum product ==> planning with RF BSs is not

possible

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Ease of project data

transfer

Model calibration

Path loss matrices

Platform and APIs

Supported RDMS

Relational

Database

Management System)

Parallel and

distributed calculation

Support of RF

technology evolution

Support of ACP

Support Organisation

Planet

A lot of result files, difficult to manage and transfer to

another computer. For example, if using a site table

(created on computer A) on computer B, the user has

to delete all the .xml and .xml.dat files in the site table

folder first.

Only support of CW measurements

Only one calculation resolution for all sectors in the

project. Only one path loss matrix for each sector.

Development toolkit and some API capability

available in v5. But the integration of 3rd party tool

with Planet is less easy than with Atoll (comment from

the 3rd party tool supplier)

Oracle and MS SQL Server

Support of multi-core workstation.

Can't find document describing the distributed

calculation

Apparently not the same policy as Forsk. For

instance EVDO needs extra license additional to

CDMA licence

Only support of Capesso/Aurad. Symena Greenfieldnot supported

Not known exactly. Mentum have offices in Hong

Kong and Australia but level and experience of

support resources in these offices not known