COST CONTROL: Pruning the telephone bills

Telephone bills are a nightmare for any corporate. The different rates for
calls between fixed and mobile phones have been further swelling the corporate
bills. For any enterprise almost 60—70 percent of its telecom bill comes from
landline to mobile calls. And, a CIO has to constantly walk a tight rope between
controlling the telecommunication bill and keeping the telecom services always
available because today they are essential to keep an enterprise alive and
running.

Any business organization or corporate house has a PBX to route the calls
being made and received. Coupled with the hunting line numbers, this method
proved cost effective when landlines dominated and mobile phones were less
prevalent.

On an average, calls made from a landline to a mobile cost Rs 1.20 per
minute. Depending on the plan adopted, if the call is placed from a mobile to
another mobile within the same network (even if the operators are different) the
rates vary from zero to Rs 0.40 per minute. The differential is greater when STD
calls are made.

So, the enterprises are looking for ways and means to control the bills
keeping in mind that more and more people are going mobile.

One way to cut the telecom bill could be to give mobile phones to all users.
However, this is not always possible. for eg., in a hotel, it is not feasible to
provide GSM phones to all the guests. And, guests' calls have to be routed
through a PBX for a variety of reasons such as ease of billing. The other,
theoretical, option is to have a pool of mobile handsets and ask the users to
use this pool for making the calls instead of the desk phones. However, this
might result in long queues for using the pool resulting in loss of
working-hours, negating any gains from the excercise.

The Solution: GSM Gateways

GSM gateways, also known as GSM routers or a fixed cellular terminal, are
devices that facilitate calls from fixed phones to mobile networks. They can be
attached to a PSTN PBX and all calls to mobile numbers are routed through it.

The gateway essentially acts as a pool of SIM cards from various mobile
operators. When a company installs a GSM gateway in its telephone system, calls
to mobile numbers are detected by the internal exchange and routed through the
appropriate SIM card in the GSM gateway. The gateway software detects that a
mobile-to-mobile call is being made and the gateway SIM card is charged at
mobile-to-mobile call rates.

The numbers and brands of SIMs to be installed is the prerogative of the
enterprise. It is useful to have an audit done to determine the number of
channels required. Leela Palace Kempinski hotel in Bangalore has installed eight
SIMs.

"We had a study done and came to know that at any given time there were
six to eight callers. Hence, we provisioned for eight cards. If a ninth caller
is there, he is routed through the normal PBX. Even then we have been successful
in cutting down the phone bills by almost 62 percent," said N Srinivasan,
telecom manager, Leela Palace.

Not only GSM gateways, enterprises can have VoIP and SMS gateways too.
"The box remains the same, we just add a few cards depending on the
requirement. The enterprise pays for the basic GSM gateway and then invests in
the cards," said PS Vijay Simha, head corporate sales, Teles, a GSM gateway
provider.

In VoIP gateways, the voice calls are routed on an IP network. This is
particularly useful for companies having multiple locations and can connect with
each other at very low cost. Similarly, the SMS gateway enables users to send
messages from their landlines and desktops.

Coming Soon: CDMA Gateways

Among the mobile phone users, there are CDMA subscribers too, and the GSM
gateways would not serve the purpose if a large number of calls were to be made
to CDMA subscribers. Unlike GSM, CDMA UIMs are embedded in the phone itself,
hence the card slot equipment is not feasible in this case. Here, operators have
to join hands with gateway manufacturers and allow the unique coding of gateways
for enterprise users. "We are working with a US-based partner to come out
with CDMA gateways. They are interacting with the Indian CDMA operators and we
expect the product to hit the market by end of April," said Vijay Simha.

Considerations for CIOs

Though cost savings will draw customers to the gateways but Indian
enterprises will take time before investing in it, as it is still a new
technology. Besides, problems like STD/ISD calls being dropped at the EPABX and
issues of gateways' compatibility with the existing EPBAXs need to be sorted
out.

"It has not been even a month since we deployed these gateways and till
now we are having problems with STD calls being dropped. We need to evaluate its
efficiency before opting for ISDs over it," said Sunil V, head
(administration), Tavant Technologies, which has a 12-SIM, GSM gateway.

As the gateways provide a digital interface, they would not support an analog
EPBAX. So, before finalizing on any gateway, CIO must ensure that the EPBAX
supports ISDN. The GSM (and soon CDMA) gateways work on protocols to interact
with the EPBAXs already installed. Normally there are three types of protocols:
PRI, E1, and T1. The basic difference between them is the area of adoption and
the number of channels they support. E.g., E1 is a European standard and
supports 30 channels while T1 is an American protocol and supports 24 channels.

Apart from checking on the ISDN and protocol compatibility, CIOs must check
whether the product has least call routing functionality and supports IP
connectivity.

E-mail to SMS conversion and call-back functionalities are optional and
depend on the enterprises-whether they want it or not.

Don't Want to Buy, Rent It

A GSM gateway would cost anything between Rs 2.25 lakh to Rs 4 lakh and even
more. Cost variations are due to the number of SIM slots and functionalities an
enterprise wants. For many enterprises, this amount might be a huge investment,
with benefits showing only after couple of months. With the pressure on capex
being high, and the management demanding optimum opex, enterprises might be
reluctant to make new investments in addition to the EPBAX already installed.

While larger enterprises may like to buy the equipment, for smaller ones,
options like rental and revenue-sharing plans are also being floated by the
gateway makers. This model works on the premise that the gateways would reduce
the telecom cost for enterprises. The equipment maker installs the gateways and
gets a certain percentage of the revenue that is saved. The percentage of
revenue sharing, which some call rental, is decided through due diligence of
inbound- and outbound-call traffic from an enterprise.

Anurag Prasad