Nearly every day, cell phone companies dispatch agents to drive city streets, measuring the strength of wireless phone signals.

This can provide useful information, but it is "equivalent to browsing the Internet without a search engine," said John Thakkar, engineering director for Mobile Meridian LLC, a Chicago start-up that offers radio frequency engineering expertise and software.

The firm has created a network performance analysis tool that it believes will give wireless carriers a better handle on network problems than the current system of driving around to test signal strength.

Every time a cell phone call is made, it generates data within the network. That information is needed to manage network traffic, provide accurate billing and so on, but it can also be used to paint a picture of where trouble spots occur.

That is the mission of the new software program devised by Mobile Meridian.

"There are millions of calls generated daily in Chicago," said Donald Drake, Mobile Meridian director. "Finding a problem in, say, Lincoln Park, is like looking for a needle in a haystack. This tool can do that."

Meridian One, as the program is called, won't replace drive testing but rather will enable the carriers to know the best places to send their vehicles when looking for ways to improve network operations, Drake said.

The company will run a pilot test of its software with one cell phone carrier and hopes to sell its software and services to several carriers.

"It's a very powerful tool," said Drake. "You can, for example, ask it to find the top 50 handsets generating dropped calls. It's likely those handsets are defective.

"The carrier could call those customers and say, `Come in and we'll swap out the phone for you'--that's great customer service."