Mobile Services: Effective Collaboration

The growth in the Indian telecom sector, particularly in wireless subscribers, has been nothing but impressive. Having surpassed 800 mn at double-digit growth rates, India stands as the world's second largest telecommunication powerhouse just after China. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's (Trai) policy to encourage competition, by ensuring a level-playing field while at the same time maintaining a technology neutral stance, has contributed significantly to the success story of India's telecom sector.

The growth in the Indian telecom sector, particularly in wireless subscribers, has been nothing but impressive. Having surpassed 800 mn at double-digit growth rates, India stands as the world's second largest telecommunication powerhouse just after China. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's (Trai) policy to encourage competition, by ensuring a level-playing field while at the same time maintaining a technology neutral stance, has contributed significantly to the success story of India's telecom sector.

Infrastructure Sharing

One of the ways in which it has ensured this level-playing field is by encouraging infrastructure sharing, which has given rise to Intra/Inter Circle Roaming. Whilst this has positive implications for service providers and consumers alike, it can also mean headaches for the 'back room' people who have to make it all happen. This article looks at the drivers for Intra/Inter Circle Roaming (ICR), and some of the ways in which it can be managed more profitably and efficiently.

Maintaining such an exponential growth in Indian subscriber numbers will require the creation of a huge infrastructure necessitating significant investment. The alternative is to optimize the use of available resources while ensuring competition and availability of services at affordable prices. Infrastructure sharing, therefore, has become a critical need.

The department of telecommunication (DoT) recognized the need for infrastructure sharing and sought the views of Trai regarding appropriate legislation or amendment of licensing conditions to encourage this. It was expected that the benefits of such infrastructure sharing would be passed on to subscribers in terms of faster rollout of new services and greater affordability of services. This initiative from the DoT gave rise to Intra/Inter Circle Roaming (ICR) scenarios, whereby operators enter into agreements to provide network connectivity via passive or active infrastructure sharing, leaving the subscriber unaware that he or she is roaming.

Rise of ICR

The rise of infrastructure sharing and its associated ICR has taken place amidst slowing growth, saturating urban penetration and intense competition, which has resulted in significant pressure on ARPU. Mobile operators find that they need to be more agile to maximize the effectiveness of competitive business and marketing strategies without being limited by an external operational environment factor which they are not able to control.

With significant disparities in the outcome of the recent 3G license distribution, where none of the operators obtained licences for all the 22 circles, this arrangement has opened the doors to enable operators to offer a more seamless 3G experience across India, to boost 3G uptake, and to enable the rapid launch of higher value innovative services which can potentially open up more monetization opportunities. Other benefits include reduced costs of operations through savings in opex and capex, which can either be passed on the subscribers or directly benefit the bottom line. Ultimately, the overall financial health of the industry improves, representing a 'win-win' for both operators and subscribers alike!

Managing Effectively

The Intra/Inter Circle Roaming concept (gleaned from the concept of domestic interconnect) has indeed given a new meaning to collaboration amongst the toughest competitors in India. Co-opetition through intra-circle roaming agreements in this case seems like a logical step around the regulatory environment restrictions. Ultimately, the customer benefits from operators' ability to offer an uninterrupted and a more consistent user experience throughout the 22 circles pan India.

With broader coverage, operators are able to drive deeper into the not-so-affluent parts of the country to sustain growth. And since ICR is not restricted to 3G services, the concept applies similarly to traditional mobile voice services over 2G as well, delivering considerable benefits to those subscribers who cannot afford the value added services represented by 3G.

However opening up one's 3G network to roaming by another operator's few hundred million subscribers involves significant complexity. Whilst not each one of your competitor's subscribers will roam at any one time, the sheer volume of CDR and EDR exchanges if not effectively managed can result in revenue leakage and ultimately revenue loss. Manually managing the CDR/EDR exchange is inefficient and makes it difficult to cope with sudden spikes in volume-again creating a significant risk of revenue leakage.

The solution lies in an inter/intra circle roaming solution (ICR), enabling huge numbers of intra/inter circle roaming settlement agreements to be settled effectively with close to 99.99% accuracy. Complicated settlement agreements can also be managed more effectively with no resultant revenue loss. ICR roaming agreements are just the first step in the collaboration, to ensure it works effectively to benefit top-line and bottom-line there needs to be a robust ICR solution in place.

The Solution

The CSG ICR Solution is derived from CSG's industry-leading WBMS-Wholesale Business Management System. The CSG ICR Solution seamlessly integrates a combination of CSG's leading BSS/OSS products, ensuring consistent and correlated data as well as a single point-of-entry for roaming agreement data. At the core of the solution is CSG's market-leading interconnect billing solution.

The CSG ICR Solution centrally manages bulk billing, wholesale rates and bilateral and roaming agreements, whilst collecting and processing events in near real-time to produce invoices and monitor business performance. It enables operators to improve the accuracy and efficiency of their wholesale business processes while lowering the cost of ownership of their business support systems.

The CSG ICR Solution supports GSMA roaming requirements and can be interfaced to the systems that are vital to a successful roaming venture: The service provider's network, external mediation, Data Clearing House (DCH), retail billing and fraud management, financial systems such as SAP, revenue assurance, MIS applications, and optionally the corporate email system to support email delivery of FDR and Invoices.

Benefiting from ICR

The solution provides the service provider's roaming department with the means to achieve greater control over the implementation and management of TAP and RAP format versions and file processing, management of roaming agreements, and over-operatio nal reporting and also offers a low total cost of ownership since it can be hosted on low commodity hardware platforms, thereby delivering cost savings in terms of hardware, application licensing, and third party licensing.

Key benefits of CSG's ICR Solution are:

• Improves cash-flow and reduces total cost of ownership
• Streamlines data management, automates processes and provides decision support
• Reduces disputes, curtails revenue leakage and increases margin

Sujit Chaudhari
The author is solutions consultant (Asia Pacific), CSG International
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in