Field note ·
Preparing a rural Yorkshire cell group for an SLA review
A cluster that includes the hills around Emley will not look like a Leeds urban dump. Here is how we prepare the exception list before the account team sits down.
Rural sectors fail SLA charts for reasons that have nothing to do with neglect: terrain, a single dominant road, church-hall events, and a small number of sites carrying a large share of the traffic. If the exception list is sorted only by worst percentage, the same hilltop cell appears every month and the review stalls.
We first split the group into road-dominated sectors and village-dominated sectors, using the cell comments the radio team already keeps. A dual-carriageway sector with a short sample of high-speed users is a different witness from a housing estate on the same eNodeB.
Second, we print traffic, not only percentages. A retainability figure on a sector that carried forty calls is not presented beside a sector that carried four thousand. The SLA may still average them; the narrative should not pretend the average is even.
Third, we mark planned engineering. If a mast feed was on a planned outage, the pack says so with the ticket reference you supply. We will not hunt your ticketing system. We will not omit the outage if you told us it happened.
Emley itself sits in Kirklees, with the transmitting station on the skyline. Visiting stakeholders sometimes treat the whole postcode as “covered by the big mast.” Radio access for public mobile is a different estate. The review note we write keeps those two facts apart in the first paragraph, so the meeting does not spend twenty minutes on the wrong structure.