Nokia Siemens Networks mediation system helps Uzbekistan’s Ucell manage huge subscriber growth

In a rapidly expanding market in 2008, UCell needed to upgrade its billing system to cope with rapidly growing subscriber base. As part of a major network revamp, Nokia Siemens Networks mediation solution has enabled the company to manage year-on-year doubling of subscribers.

“Transparent and accurate billing is essential for our customers, so collecting the charging data records and processing them in one place for our billing systems is important for managing the customer growth.”

 


Okan Cimen,
Service Network Department Director, UCell

Booming subscriber numbers highlighted the need for an effective billing process for Uzbekistan's fastest growing GSM operator FE Coscom LLC, operating under the UCell brand. The Uzbekistan-based company’s in-house mediation system for collating data from across the network couldn’t cope effectively with the rapid expansion and ensure stable growth. UCell needed a reliable solution, because its anticipated subscriber growth rate would only be possible with revenue coming in from existing subscribers to support the high-speed expansion. In April 2008, UCell selected the Nokia Siemens Networks convergent mediation solution to collect and process data for accurate billing of its prepaid and postpaid customers.

Challenges

  • UCell's in-house mediation was unable to cope effectively with rapid subscriber growth
  • The network featured equipment from multiple vendors
  • New service launches involved complex integration of the billing system with multiple vendor interfaces, slowing time to market and incurring high costs

Mediation plays a vital role in a complex network, where the billing system needs access to the information from a multitude of network elements that are often supplied by multiple vendors. The information arrives at the mediation system in many different formats and the system converts it into a consistent format, which enables the billing system to charge subscribers for the services they use.

Solutions

  • The flexible Nokia Siemens Networks charge@once mediation system features built-in redundancy
  • The system handles data from different network elements supplied by multiple vendors
  • New services can be implemented using changes to the mediation system rather than the billing system.

Transparency and accuracy

Nokia Siemens Networks is a key supplier for UCell in a strategic partnership that includes a 2G network roll-out and a turnkey 3G project to provide data coverage. The answer to the mediation problem lay in the Nokia Siemens Networks charge@once mediate solution. As well as ensuring that all services are charged transparently and accurately, charge@once mediate also speeds up the introduction of new services by making it easy to integrate any new charging information into the billing system. Because changes only need to be made to the mediation system and not the billing system itself, this can speed up the time taken to introduce any new service to the market from weeks to days.

Benefits

  • A single, reliable mediation system enables UCell to charge accurately for services with no outages or loss of revenue
  • Flexible mediation simplifies the integration of new services, reducing time to market from months to days
  • charge@once mediate helped UCell to achieve its planned expansion

Nokia Siemens Networks is involved in all aspects of UCell’s network business, and this accelerates the arrival of new services even further. Any new service processes can be developed in parallel with the necessary changes to the mediation system, rather than waiting for a service to be developed before beginning to integrate it with the billing system.

Reliability and flexibility

The robust design of the mediation system features redundancy to prevent any losses, and there have been no major outages since the new system was installed.

With secure revenues and new subscriber services available, UCell has successfully achieved its forecasted growth figures and subscriber numbers rose from just more than 1 million to 5 million (according to the local subscriber reporting policy) in only 18 months. Customer numbers are expected to experience further significant growth in 2010, so the company has also signed a further deal with Nokia Siemens Networks to extend its core network capacity and control costs by installing the latest mobile soft switching and packet core network technology.

“Without an effective mediation layer, we would not have been able to achieve the rapid growth in customers,” confirms UCell’s Service Network Department Director, Okan Cimen “It also makes service enablement very easy.”