Deploying IN Services using eBill

The customer is an incumbent wireline operator, the Number One Telecommunications company and the largest Public Sector Undertaking in India. The Telco has a network of over 45 million lines covering 5000 towns, with over 35 million telephone connections.

The service provider is focused on facilitating easy development of new and innovative feature-rich offerings, substantially reducing the turnaround time for the introduction or modification of these services, reducing developmental costs and introducing more complex network functions by which users can manage and modify their own data.

The requirement

The customer was keen on exploring a new domain of applications to meet its business goals. It was looking at rolling out the first Intelligent Network in the country to demonstrate a service-independent architectural concept, which was applicable to all kinds of networks.

Recognizing the rising expectations and needs of its ever expanding subscriber base, the incumbent was keen to harness the power of technology to further revolutionize the telecom vertical. In tune with this end and to redefine its telecom
Services, it required a value added services (VAS) solution in the form of an Intelligent Network (IN).

The main distinguishing feature of an IN architecture with respect to a conventional switching network architecture is that here, the intelligence or the logic for execution of value-added services is removed from the switch and is placed in a central computer called the Service Control Point (SCP). IN provides a programmable network, which can be updated and expanded to offer new services quickly and easily via the software.

The Telco wanted to pioneer the rolling out of this IN services offering and approached a network equipment provider to design a network that offered seamless connectivity and hands-off between mobile and fixed access.

The equipment supplier partnered with an organization boasting expertise in network communication interfaces, to build the systems integration solution for the customer.
The system integrator in turn selected Infozech to provide an efficient solution that would take care of all the functional needs of billing and customer care for the telco in a cost effective manner.

The Solution

In providing the solution, Infozech had to combat the following challenges:

• Meet the stringent timeline for the deployment of the solution: The Service provider entrusted us with the responsibility of implementing the system within a short time frame of about four weeks
• Integrate diverse VAS in the solution: The IN platform included diverse value added services such as ACC, VCC VPN, UAN, UPN, LNP, FPH and televoting. In the case of services like the UAN and UPN, there can be two scenarios where either the voter or the pollster pays. The latter case entails complex revenue sharing requirements between the service provider, subscriber and the end user. The parameters on the basis of which this revenue can be shared are totally configurable, based on the needs of the service provider.
• Integrate the remotely located Alcatel switch with our billing and customer care solution: We needed to connect our eBill solution with the Alcatel equipment in a near real-time environment.
• Ensure data and transaction integrity in a multi-platform environment: Infozech had to ensure that its solution encompassed a security system that would securely allow the software to be accessed over the LAN, intranet or the Internet.

Infozech’s solution was aimed at helping the service provider launch the following services:

Infozech not only provided a scalable, powerful and modular billing system for handling the revenue streams from the new territory of services, it also facilitated everlasting customer associations via its CRM processes.

The solution encompassed a comprehensive and exhaustive suite of functionalities, which were centered around the following offerings:

• The periodicity of collecting the CDRs was configured for each service and optimized for different traffic and load conditions. In the case of a service called Televoting, for instance, where the volume of data traffic could go as high as 7 lakh transactions within three hours, Infozech’s solution automatically scheduled CDR collection at smaller intervals. In addition, it allowed the configuration of multipliers to substantially increase the frequency of CDR import.
• Infozech’s solution provided a comprehensive list of charge classes for various call types including fixed-to-fixed, mobile-(GSM/WLL)tofixed, National Long Distance (NLD) and International Long Distance (ILD). This was done taking into account India’s over 1000 unique calling areas. For each calling area to be able to call any of the other 1000 areas, it would give rise to a set of (1000 * 1000) ie.1 million unique source/destination combinations. Infozech’s solution filtered each one of these combinations and identified the corresponding charge classes mapped against them.
• The solution created a specific set of Remote Operator Interfaces to fetch the destination bill for any desired IN subscriber for enquiry and printing purposes. It covered the customer’s expansive network that stretched across five zones, including locations such as Hyderabad, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Bangalore.
• Infozech provided 85 remote operator interfaces (ROIs) per zone, to access the zonal database for monitoring purposes at one time, which meant a simultaneous access capability of 85 * 5 Number of ROIs.
• Infozech’s solution allowed the backup of all CDRs, processed bills and the complete database to take place periodically on the backup device. The database backup could be taken on the SQL Server at the Infozech end and stored at the client premises through various media such as tape, disk etc.

The benefits achieved by the customer

The customer achieved the following benefits from the Infozech solution:

• High scalability
  The solution enabled the customer to scale its IN services from a relatively smaller base of operations to almost three times its scale of operations. The client rapidly moved up from its first to third phase of implementation, where Infozech's test results showed a capacity to deliver more than the rating requirement of that phase.
• Reduction on total cost of ownership
  By deploying i-Rater, the configuration and enablement was done in only 7 days, while the normal deployment time would have taken 90-120 days. This brought about a significant reduction in time to deploy and efforts involved, thereby reducing the total cost of ownership.
• Ease of deployment and addition of new services
  Since the IN system was the first deployment of its kind in the country, newer and complex unforeseen issues arose frequently. Infozech's offering, with its finely tuned processes and minimum customization requirement, helped the customer overcome the challenges and launch newer and complex services rapidly.
• Increased flexibility due to platform independence
  The solution was built on the popular Microsoft platform, providing users with familiarity and ease-of-use. Being platform-agnostic, the system could be ported on to any other OS environments such as Linux, Unix, Solaris etc thereby providing the client with increased flexibility.
• Seamless integration due to modular nature
  Infozech provided a Billing System as a standalone entity without any redundancy. The modular solution seamlessly integrated with third party applications, with minimal effort in terms of customization.