Enabling VoIP services Rollout Using e-Bill

The client is a leading broadband service provider in Mexico. It offers both voice and ISP services to small and medium scale enterprises. It offers phone services to SMEs in Mexico City. These services are provided to enterprises in the vicinity of the customer’s optical fiber network, that allows its customers to have direct access to the PSTN network. It also offers broadband services to business organizations based on the Gigabit Ethernet Technology.

It already had a system in place to take care of its existing billing for voice and ISP services. The billing system it used was a homegrown solution developed by the company’s in-house team to take care of existing needs. It’s goal was to additionally roll out VOIP services to its target customers.

The customer

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 client was looking at introducing the following services:

• Prepaid VOIP calling card services
• Post-paid enterprise VOIP services
• Post-paid enterprise IP Centrex Service

These services were targeted at enterprises with over 500 to 1000 users.

It required a convergent billing and customer care system that would provide it with an integrated platform for its existing services with the new corporate VoIP and pre-paid services.

The Solution

The company already had a Lucent5ESS in service for the existing network.
It had acquired the following components in order to provide the above-mentioned services:

• SIP Express Router (SER) from IPTel for proxy functions of VoIP calling card services.
• Broad Soft IP Centrex for post-paid VoIP services and corporate VoIP.

The system was seamlessly integrated with these components along with the payment gateway and RADIUS.

The solution provided by Infozech encompassed the following features:

• Online payment integration with ICVerify Web authorize
• Support for the following payment methods:
• Credit Card: MasterCard, Visa, and American Express
• Bank Interface: Online integration with 15 different banks for online payments.
• Multi-currency support for US Dollar and the Mexican Peso
• Multi-lingual support on the web for customer self care
• Multiple services with multiple billing cycle support
• Efficient rating and re-rating of invalid CDRs, an integrated functionality of Infozech’s billing and customer care module was
• Web provisioning for the customer sign up through the web and online account management facilities. This also took care of immediate activation of the end users.

The benefits achieved by the customer

“CAPEX” savings
The client got the benefits of a typical Tier-1 (end-to-end billing and customer care) system at a fraction of the cost of a multi-million-dollar deployment.

Savings on “Integration costs”
It saved significant money in integration costs since the solution provided by Infozech was componentized, enabling rapid integration. The integration cost was less than 25 percent of a similar, typical multi-layered integration.

Savings on “Time to market”
The entire solution was deployed in phases. Phase I was delivered and made operational in 3 months of the contractual agreement. Phase II was made operational within the next two months.

The phased deployment enabled it to start acquiring customers by offering a complete suite of basic services within a short time span. Thus it saved precious time in entering the market.

Savings on “Operational Costs”
Infozech provided training to the operator’s employees, thereby empowering them to manage day-to-day operations. The company also provided the operator with high caliber 24/7 support enabling the reduction of ongoing operational costs.

Efficiency through process optimization
It’s subscribers could sign up through the web portal and get automatically provisioned without human intervention. This reduced the provisioning time from 48 hours to 5 minutes. Earlier CSRs did the provisioning work.

Freedom to choose plans Online for customers
End users were able to change the products or plans by themselves using the web self care interface. The changed products could automatically take effect.