Imagine hearing two statements repeated over and over for hours every day: “These days, chicken leg is a rare dish,” and “The jacket hung on the back of the wide chair.” Thomas Pannackal has to hear those phrases repeated endlessly from a bank of laptops mounted over the passenger seat of the white Chevy Trailblazer he drives through streets and highways of suburban Chicago and rural Illinois. Occasionally the odd recorded dialogue is interrupted by something equally distracting: perhaps the distinct 10-tone sound of a phone number entered from speed dial, or a voice uttering an unidentifiable phrase resembling a bird call, or any number of seemingly random recorded blurbs of information pertaining to satellite positions and vehicle movements.

No, this is not some twisted psychology experiment. It’s not the new season of “Lost.” Nor is it a new Pentagon interrogation technique (though if it were, it surely wouldn’t pass Geneva Convention muster).

Pannackal is one of Verizon Wireless’ system performance engineers, and he is driving a Verizon Wireless SUV decked out with half-a-million dollars worth of Comarco test-and-measurement gear. Last week Pannackal gave Telephony a demonstration of what he and hundreds of other engineers do on a daily basis to keep VZW’s nationwide network optimized. He may not have the horn-rimmed glasses or the sporty little jacket, but Pannackal is the real-world equivalent of the Test Man character Verizon Wireless made famous in its “Can you hear me now?” commercials--except he’s got a lot more equipment.

“… chicken leg is a rare dish…” chirped one of the laptops chirped as Pannackal turned east the Trailblazer onto 51^st Street in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood.

“After a while, we block out those messages,” Pannackal admitted. “We stop hearing them and just listen for the performance updates.” The wide chair and chicken chatter are really specifically selected phrases devised by the minds of Swiss programmers that most succinctly test the full phonetic range of the English language--almost all of the distinguishable sounds a human being would utter in a typical conversation are contained in those two sentences.

In the SUV’s trunk are four big black boxes, each sprouting a spaghetti mass of cords and wires linked to roof-mounted antennas, the front-seat laptops and power supplies. Inside those boxes are more than a dozen phones and data cards—and not just Verizon’s but also its competitors—each in its own isolation chamber so street noise, feedback and the other cellphones don’t overlace its test messages. In the spare-tire well is a highly sensitive GPS transponder, which logs the location of the test vehicle, the surround cell towers, and the time and termination point of thousands of test calls on the laptops internal memory as well as servers back a Verizon’s regional HQ in Schaumburg, where the test calls originate.

A disembodied female voice informed Pannackal that his vehicle was no longer moving, though with his foot firmly on the brake at the red light on Drexel Avenue and his body turned 180 degrees to talk to his passengers in the backseat, Pannackal seemed fully aware he had stopped.

“We’re testing not only Verizon’s network, but the networks of all of the leading providers--anyone with more than 5% market share,” Pannackal explained. “We don’t just want our network to perform well. We want to outperform our competitors.”

Nationally Verizon Wireless has set an internal goal on its network performance falling no less than 2% of its competitors on any given measurement, whether the measure be voice quality, signal strength, or call termination percentage. Pannackal proudly said his own two-state’s internal goal is to keep that number below 1.5%. To do this Verizon Wireless fields 96 Trailblazers, each testing different regions of the U.S. While the individual vehicles switch routes daily, the routes themselves don’t change covering every major road and highway in the U.S. and a lot of lesser roads in more densely populated urban areas. Pannackal said Verizon runs each of those routes at least once a quarter, meaning its test drivers cover the entire breadth of its footprint every three months.

“The jacket hung on the back of the wide chair…”

Pannackal swung the test vehicle onto Lake Shore Drive and made a beeline for the central business district. This met with a flurry of activity on the laptops as the truck’s dozen or so antennae were suddenly flooded with strong signals from high-rise cell sites pointed at Chicago’s busy easternmost expressway.

At the end of a run—lasting usually three to four hours—the signal analysis data from the inboard computers is compiled with the voice quality data. The data is analyzed and if any problem spots are identified engineers can be dispatched within a few days to fix glitches or optimize an underperforming cell site, Pannackal said. Often issues can be fixed with as little as a new tilt angle on an antenna, but if more serious issues such as capacity problems are spotted another test group can be dispatched to perform a more thorough evaluation of a particular problem area, which may eventually result in further network buildout, Pannackal said.

“We definitely use this data to make a better network,” Pannackal said. “We set very stringent goals for ourselves. Our bonuses are even based on the overall quality of the network, so everyone takes great pride in its performance.”

As Pannackal navigated back into the steel and concrete canyons of Chicago’s downtown Loop, the voice issues a stern warning that we have lost contact with GPS satellites. Pannackal, however, didn’t seem concerned with the direness of this situation as he calmly guided his truck through the dense traffic. Nor did the laptops, which buzzed along merrily. “These days, chicken leg is…”

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