 On January 30th of 2003, two of our team members, Shaun Halberstadt and Michael Rainer departed from our offices in Tyler, Texas for 24 hours of constant travel. Their trip landed them in the beautiful city of Sydney, Australia. No, they weren't there just to see the sights and bask in the Australian sun (though they certainly didn't miss the opportunity), they were there to perform two weeks of installation and training for our latest client, Australia's Telstra.
 Telstra is to Australia as AT&T is to the USA. They dominate the telephone and internet market for the entire country. They also handle the wireless trunked radio networks for the Australian government - which is where Genesis comes in. We provided them with our newest solution, GenSZAI Enterprise. Telstra's trunked radio network is large, and performance demands are high, so we rose to this challenge by developing a new system architecture that can handle the many demands of larger radio systems (network usage, real-time reporting, hardware costs, etc.) while still keeping hardware costs as low as possible.
The training sessions included 7 Telstra employees (Mario, Andrew, Shane, Rohan, Kaushal, Len, Graham) and our two Genesis representatives. Michael Rainer and Shaun Halberstadt departed on January 30th for a two week installation and training period.
The first week involved preparing the Telstra network and their hardware to run the GenSZAI Enterprise system. Friday afternoon at 4:45 the readers were reading, the processors were processing, and the database was giving Telstra it's first look at the system's activity.
Week two saw Shaun giving instruction on the architecture of GenSZAI Enterprise, the installation and maintenance procedures, and use of NetVista 2. Michael covered SQL, MS Query, Query Analyzer, and Enterprise Manager. Both then guided Telstra employees through the ins and outs of writing reports to get information from their database.
How GenSZAI Enterprise brings value to Telstra
 Typical GenSZAI solutions for single zone systems operate well on a single machine. This one machine performs all of the GenSZAI duties: ATIA packet collection, packet decoding and data processing, and SQL table storage. However, in a system such as Telstra's, with multiple OmniLinks in widely spread geographic locations, something new needed to be done. We separated GenSZAI into its three distinct processes, building each in a way that it could operate remotely from the others. This architecture allows Telstra to read ATIA locally from various zone controller locations and then transmit these packets to a central location where data processors are ready to decode and format the data. The data processors, each capable of handling many reader connections, then pass the data on to a data warehouse that stores all of their system's information. This ultimately lowers bandwidth requirements on their WAN, provides centralized, real-time reporting from the data warehouse, and decreases the hardware and third party software costs of having a regular GenSZAI machine at each zone.
With GenSZAI/NetVista 2, Telstra now has:
- Real-time reporting on any or all zones in their system
- A centralized processing and data reporting location
- Real-time monitoring of system activity, including active calls, idle sites, busy sites, etc. A collection of core ready-for-use reports
- Access to the database for generating their own reports
- Automatic billing file creation at specified intervals
- Raw data archive of all ATIA packets ever sent
- Dedicated support from Genesis
- Much, much more!
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Australia has a country-wide network of trunked radio sites that provide service to all reaches of the continent. Yes, even deep in the outback where there may be only 10 inhabitants in the whole site. Quite astonishing, when you consider Australia's 7.6 million square km land mass (US = 9 million sq km).