AI-driven network planning: site placement and footprint

Three ways to see it

1. 1

   Network planning is the discipline of deciding where to put a cell site, what spectrum to use on it, what antenna pattern to set, and what backhaul to feed it with. Pakistani operators add and modify thousands of sites every year, constrained by PTA spectrum auctions, USF rural mandates, landlord economics, and the rising input cost of solar plus battery in unstable-grid areas. AI shifts planning from spreadsheet plus rule of thumb toward optimisation over millions of candidate configurations.

2. 2

   Way one to think about it: data tells you the demand surface, not the supply surface. Anonymised CDR aggregates show where calls and data sessions originate at every hour, where indoor traffic spikes, where customers are dropping packets and giving up. This demand surface should drive supply decisions. In practice, planning teams often decide on supply first, by landlord availability, and rationalise demand later. Letting demand data lead, even by 20 percent of decisions, lifts coverage outcomes per rupee.

3. 3

   Way two: ray tracing now runs cheap. A decade ago detailed propagation modelling for a 100-square-kilometre cluster took a workstation a weekend. Today GPU-accelerated ray tracing or 3D propagation models like NVIDIA Sionna run the same job in minutes. This means a planner can evaluate not three candidate locations for a site but 300, ranking them by predicted population covered, indoor penetration, neighbour interference, and tilt sensitivity. The bottleneck moves from compute to good 3D building data, which Pakistan still partly lacks outside major cities.

The why-tree

Try this with Claude

AI-edge prompt: 'I lead radio planning at a Pakistani operator with 9,500 sites. Recommend a 12-month roadmap to introduce AI into our planning workflow: (1) data foundations we must fix first, (2) propagation modelling tooling tradeoffs (NVIDIA Sionna vs Atoll vs in-house), (3) USF and tower-sharing scoring features, (4) feedback loop from deployed-site KPIs into the next plan, (5) the two roles I should hire and the three vendor RFP questions I should sharpen.'