Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Avoiding accidents

During the Xmas weekend I was driving from Helsingborg to Germany in an SUV filled with luggage and 3 kids on board…. Having driven this roads hundreds of times I feel like I know it like the back of my hand… Having said that this weekend was the second time a car in front of me crashed violently while driving on a German highway (A1) where there are no speed limits (in most parts).

This is how it happened…. I was driving at 180 km/h when two cars passed me by (Golf R and BMW 5). When the BMW was about 3 seconds from me it blew a tire, spin in the middle of the highway twice and hit the barrier on the side of the road…I managed to avoid collision and saw that the occupants in the BMW that crashed into the barrier looked OK, and the other car driving with it had stopped and so are other cars. Having 3 kids on board I decided to drive on and report the incident. What amazes me is that my daughter pointed out that the car is doing strange 2 seconds before I saw it happened, did she saw it happened before it actually did? Was  I too slow to realized what’s happening?  The question is such an accident avoidable in the first place?

In cars we avoid accidents both by prevention and reaction. Prevention by ensuring cars are always in the best condition and working order, while driving defensively and carefully. Reaction by ensuring you are always alert, always know what’s happening around you and what’s happening to your car from how the tire feels when it is in contact with the tarmac to how the engine sounds when you press on the accelerator and from how the brake reacts when you press on the brake pedal… This we do everyday sometimes out habit, in a lot of cases due to several years of practice…

Now when it comes to mobile networks, are there really accidents? Sometimes the network goes down, is this an accident? In a professionally managed mobile networks, there are no accidents. Any network problem is caused by inefficiencies in planing and maintaining that network. Consider how a passenger in a car feels while going through an accident… now treat that similarly as as a mobile user when the service suddenly fails in  the middle of an important conversation or while using online communications…. Its traumatic….

As a service provider how can you avoid this accidents? How can you ensure your mobile subscribers are not having a traumatic experience?