Atoll

Current Version 2.8

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,
Company
very well. Fast business growth in past 2
years
Profitable every year since foundation,
consistent and stable company

Focussed on Radio Planning software since

Company activity
1987. Original developers of Atoll
Private company still owned and managed by
Type of company
founders
Forsk started development of Atoll since 1996.
First Atoll released in 1997. Atoll was the first
Product history
commercial UMTS RF planning tool in the
market (Y2000)
Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Vodafone, Motorola,
Nortel. Atoll is now the only RF planning tool
OEMs and global with OEM relationships with equipment
stategic partnerships vendors.
Atoll LTE used by all major LTE equipment
vendors

50% market share in Europe (Turkey included)

#1 in Europe and Asia Pacific
Market share Increasing market share in USA
#1 in UMTS, CDMA, WiMAX and LTE
Recent important replacements of Aircom

CPU: dual-core or better

Hardware
RAM: 2GB or more
Recommendations
Free hard disc space: 10GB +
Good support of both English and non-English
Language
languages
User friendliness /
Users report high satisfaction with ease of use
Ease of use

Developed by Forsk. Specially optimized for

RF calculations and fast change of views
GIS
Supports a lot of digital map formats, including
MapInfo, Planet, bil, ArcView

Setup file size and Single file, about 50Mb. Easy and quick
installation process installation (less than 5 mins)

GSM/GPRS/EDGE/EDGE+
UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA/HSPA+
CDMA2000 1xRTT/EVDO Rev0/EVDO RevA
WiMAX 802.16d/802.16e
Supported RF LTE
technologies TD-SCDMA
Microwave Links

Microwave Links can be planned standalone

or together with main network
 Atoll
Easy. Project data, path loss matrices,
Ease of project data prediction studies and simulation results, even
transfer digital maps can be embedded in one single
.ATL file.

Support of both CW measurement and Test

Model calibration
Mobile data

Calculation resolution can be defined on each

sector basis. Up to 2 path loss matrices (with
Path loss matrices
individual resolution, radius and propagation
model) supported for each sector

Open platform with a lot of APIs (general APIs

to read/write Atoll tables, propagation model
specific API, AFP specific API).
Platform and APIs
Ease of integration of 3rd party modules/tools.
Large variety of thoird party tools supported:
the most in the industry

Supported RDMS Oracle, MS SQL Server, MS Access and

（Relational Sybase are all supported.
Database But separate database is NOT required for
Management System) standalone usage.

Support of up to 8 threadings per computer.

Only one license/computer is consumed in
Parallel and
case of multi-threading and multi-core
distributed calculation
workstation.
Support of distributed calculation

Policy of considering these as RF technology

Support of RF
module upgrade (i.e. no extra module fee is
technology evolution
needed as long as license in maintenance

Integration of Atoll ACP module for GSM,

UMTS, WiMAX and LTE
Also support of 3rd party ACP tools, including
Support of ACP
Capesso/Aurad, Arieso, Actix WiNES,
Schema etc.
Capesso Greenfield supported

Very strong regional support office based in

South China, has been supporting Atoll for
Support Organisation
more than 6 years. Additional support centre
being created in Delhi, India
 Planet
Current Version 5.2

Mentum has patchy profitability over last few years

Company and have builkt their radio planning tool business by
acquisitions, not organic growth

Radio Planning software only recently (bought Planet

Company activity business from Ericsson). Background in transmission
planning software
Type of company Substantially owned by Venture Capital

Once the leading GSM RF planning tool, but very

Product history slow development in the past years since the change
of owners: MSI->Marconi->Ericsson->Mentum

OEMs and global

None
stategic partnerships

Exact status not known, but has been damaged in

Market share
recent years by uncertainty surrounding company

CPU: 3GHz
Hardware
RAM: 2GB
Recommendations
Free hard disc space: 200GB(1GB/5 sites)
Chinese not displayed properly ==> How about other
Language
languages?
User friendliness /
Users report generally not very easy to use
Ease of use
MapInfo. ==>
- Not efficient on big scale of networks
- slow correction of bugs on GIS.
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
Setup file size and is included. (But if there is MapInfo already installed,
installation process MapInfo has to be removed before installation of
Planet)

GSM,UMTS and CDMA2000/EV-DO/WiMAX/LTE

supported in v5.2.
Supported RF
technologies

Microwave Links plannning is supported by another

Mentum product ==> planning with RF BSs is not
possible
 Planet
A lot of result files, difficult to manage and transfer to
another computer. For example, if using a site table
Ease of project data
(created on computer A) on computer B, the user has
transfer
to delete all the .xml and .xml.dat files in the site table
folder first.

Model calibration Only support of CW measurements

Only one calculation resolution for all sectors in the

Path loss matrices
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
Platform and APIs
with Planet is less easy than with Atoll (comment from
the 3rd party tool supplier)

Supported RDMS
（Relational
Oracle and MS SQL Server
Database
Management System)

Support of multi-core workstation.

Parallel and
Can't find document describing the distributed
distributed calculation
calculation

Apparently not the same policy as Forsk. For

Support of RF
instance EVDO needs extra license additional to
technology evolution
CDMA licence

Only support of Capesso/Aurad. Symena Greenfield

Support of ACP
not supported

Not known exactly. Mentum have offices in Hong

Support Organisation Kong and Australia but level and experience of
support resources in these offices not known