Unitech Wireless today provided Telcordia with its fourth significant contract in the Indian market for its real-time charging solution. The deal with Telcordia, which will run to the tens of millions of dollars and calls for the deployment of Telcordia’s prepaid mobile services platform, is part of Unitech’s overall pan-Indian GSM network buildout.
Telcordia’s Real Time Charging solution will allow Unitech Wireless to consolidate charging for advanced voice and data services for all 22 circles across India into a single convergent platform. It can handle Unitech’s demands for prepaid-postpaid, voice-data-content, and circuit-packet convergence.
Rohit Chandra, chief operating officer at Unitech Wireless, said the order placed with Telcordia is one of the major orders for equipment and solutions placed by Unitech Wireless this year as it builds its GSM network. “Leveraging existing competencies in the infrastructure and services space will be central to our strategy to reduce time-to-market and ensure a swift and cost-efficient rollout of our services in the Indian market,” he said.
Telcordia has an ongoing relationship with IBM and built its solution on the IBM BladeCenter. Telcordia also engaged IBM to provide local support. The Telcordia solution also uses Telesoft Technologies’ OKEFORD media platform technology.
Overall, the Telcordia Real-Time Charging solution makes it easy to create and deploy customer-specific rules for rating, discounting, promotions, and settlements, and enables communications service providers to differentiate their service offerings and personalize the mobile experience for their customers.
Earlier this month, Telcordia also announced that Aircel, a GSM operator based in Gurgaon, India implemented Telcordia’s Real-Time Charging solution in five months. Aircel will use the platform to support its Pan-India network rollout and support the introduction of interactive, real-time services and tariff plans.
Aircel is part of Maxis Communications Berhad, Malaysia, which is India's fifth largest GSM mobile service provider with a subscriber base of over 20 million.
In conjunction with its Aircel announcement, and in accordance with its growing presence in the region, Telcordia appointed Anuj Kapur as Country Head for Telcordia in India. Kapur has more than 20 years of sales, distribution, marketing, business development and corporate strategy experience. Previously, he served as Country Head (Telecom) Marketing and Infrastructure at Samsung, vice president and head of sales in India at Alcatel, and director of services sales in South Asia for Alcatel Lucent.
“India continues to experience exceptional rates of subscriber growth and communication service providers (CSPs) will look to attract new subscribers and increase service use to boost revenue by differentiating their service offerings,” Kapur said.
It is this growth in part that leads operators in India to seek proven solutions rather than rely on the strong development community with the country to develop new solutions. “They have been using local vendors for different applications, but clearly the area in which we operate is very mission critical and real-time and I think with the scale Indian operators have now, they want to avoid risk by using time-tested solutions,” Kapur said.
Restrictions on the new GSM licenses in India require they be used for serving unserved areas rather than widening current spectrum. This is leading to many Greenfield opportunities in the country, most of which are in the prepaid market. This heightens the demand on real-time charging, which Kapur said is the primary element of the Telcordia’s prepaid mobile services platform
