PROTEI participates in the West African telecom operator’s network upgrade

PROTEI completed a large comprehensive project to modernize the infrastructure elements of the leading Mauritania’s telecom operator Chinguitel, during which several platforms and services were introduced at once. The project took place as part of the transformation of the operator billing system, carried out by Nexign, a global BSS provider.

Chinguitel is one of the largest communications service providers in Mauritania, with a subscriber base of over 1.2 million subscribers, providing mobile services and broadband Internet access. Chinguitel has an excellent reputation for providing subscribers with top-notch services, yet the company never stops innovating. Chinguitel’s previous billing system was built solely for prepaid subscribers. To serve postpaid subscribers, the CSP used an in-house solution. As the two systems were not integrated consistently, when new products and services were introduced, postpaid subscribers were not billed correctly. Since developing and supporting such a complex solution required extensive internal resources, Chinguitel was struggling to ensure a competitive time-to-market (TTM) for new products and services. These factors resulted in a revenue decrease for the telecom operator. To improve subscriber services and TTM, Chinguitel took the decision to replace their outdated, inflexible billing system with a modern, converged solution designed for the digital era. Following careful consideration of several vendors and solutions, Chinguitel chose Nexign Converged BSS and Nexign Network Monetisation Suite.

As part of the radical upgrade of the BSS domain, the replacement was required not only for the billing system itself, but also for the key ‘adjacent’ service platforms integrated with it, such as SCP, SMSC, USSDC, Call Completion Suite, and Call Center. PROTEI was selected as the supplier of the entire bundle of service platforms. One of key reason for the customer to make this choice was the great experience of Nexign and PROTEI previous cooperation; such experience eliminated any integration problems and guaranteed a short deadline for project implementation, which was especially important for the customer.

One of the distinguishing features of the project was the necessity to integrate SCP not only with the GSM segment of the Chinguitel network, but also with the CDMA segment, which uses a specific protocol stack. Another interesting detail of the project architecture is the use of a unified service creation environment for all kind of customer care services being delivered in automated mode (e.g. USSD, IVR, USSD-like for CDMA subscribers etc). The implemented solution is based on the PROTEI Service Builder product. This approach dramatically speeds up the development, implementation and modernization of services, since a convenient visualized environment for designing new and managing existing services is used. As a part of the solution, a notification system was also deployed, which is used to conduct bulk SMS campaigns addressed to Chinguitel subscribers. These campaigns are occasionally launched by the operator to inform Muaritani (GSM segment) and Zaki (CDMA network segment) subscribers about special offers in order to stimulate the consumption of various operator’s services. It is worth mentioning that the reporting structure of the units responsible for subscription services was significantly different from that adopted by other customers, which required improvements in the reporting systems IVR, USSDC and Call-center. Nevertheless, the tasks were successfully solved, and now all the platforms of the bundles are now serving Chinguitel subscribers.

The partnership of the companies began in 2004 when the project for introducing a convergent billing system at MegaFon was launched. The partners' assets include joint projects in the networks of telecom operators. In all PROTEI solutions where support for interfaces for on-line billing is required (SCP, SMSC, etc.), protocols / dialects for interaction with the Nexign’s BSS solution are natively supported. Such approach significantly reduces the time for implementation and integration of platforms during implementation joint projects.