InfoVista, now with the Mentum acquisition under its belt, aims to help service providers get their LTE (News - Alert) networks, including small cell deployments, up and running faster.

That’s the word from Juan Pablo Prieto Baez, product marketing manager – mobile services at InfoVista, who met with INTERNET TELEPHONY at the recent Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) in Barcelona.

InfoVista got its start in MPLS performance management and service assurance, but is expanding into mobile. The acquisition of privately-owned Mentum (News - Alert), which InfoVista announced and closed in late November, strengthened InfoVista’s play in the radio access space.

Mentum offers solutions in the network planning and modeling space. In fact, at Mobile World Congress last week, InfoVista announced the release of Mentum Planet 5.6, which includes enhanced 3D modeling features.

Before you launch a network, especially a very large one, you need to know what gear is needed, and where to put it, says Baez. Mentum has more than 250 mobile service provider customers, which rely on the company for radio access planning and modeling, and more than 100 of those customers leverage Mentum solutions for their LTE deployments. That customer list includes such companies as Sprint (News - Alert) and Telus.

Planning is a function that happens with every next cycle, says Baez, but now with LTE it’s become more complex because LTE involves not just macrocells, but also small cells and Wi-Fi offload infrastructure, he says. And while the standard planning cycle used to be six months to a year, it is now more on the order of three months, given mobile operators are expected to add small cells regularly as needed.

One of the network planning bottlenecks is getting a view of what the network is currently doing so you understand what needs to be done, says Baez. By integrating InfoVista and Mentum products, he says, the newly combined companies can open up that bottleneck and shorten that timeline.