Telcel Becomes More Agile with Next-Generation Service-Based Subscriber Data Management

Introduction

Telcel Mexico is the local brand of America Movil, a Fortune 500 company and one of the largest companies in Latin America. It has over 236 million subscribers in Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean, making it the fourth largest mobile operator in the world. Like many mobile operators, Telcel is facing the challenge of modernizing its infrastructure to improve operational efficiency and to quickly deliver new revenue-generating services to its broad customer base.

Given competitive pressures and the size and growth of its customer base, Telcel is looking to transform its back-office operations in order to quickly introduce new services with low operating cost. Key functions to be addressed are charging, assurance, and pre-paid billing. These systems must be scalable, highly reliable, flexible, and secure.

Telcel needed to replace its legacy subscriber data management system for a number of reasons. Operating costs were high because multiple databases were required to support applications. There was a lack of service and support because of the age of the system, and new services could not be easily added because of the dependence on subscriber data. Dependency on old server and storage design limited scalability and Telcel’s ability to keep up with growth in subscriber numbers. Also, old database design resulted in poor reliability and disaster recovery.

For part of the OS upgrade, Telcel chose ZTE to provide a next-generation subscriber data management system called universal subscriber profile platform (ZXUN USPP).

Implementation

In late 2009, Telcel decided to upgrade to a new subscriber management system. Among the six vendors that were considered during the thorough RFP evaluation, ZTE was selected for its solution and experience. ZTE established a project implementation team comprising experts from its China headquarters and local office to work closely with Telcel.

The ZTE implementation team provided detailed professional services to smoothly migrate from the legacy platform. ZTE worked to tight deadlines:

• planning and technical specifications: one month
• hardware and software installation: one month
• testing of availability, security, and management: one month
• integration of value added applications such as, ringtones, SMS, and voicemail: three months
• migration from legacy provisioning system: one week

During each phase of the project, ZTE worked closely with Telcel’s operations personnel to provide onsite training and knowledge transfer. ZTE also now provides round-the-clock support services for Telcel.

Challenges

An important challenge in this project was to smoothly migrate from the legacy platform to next-generation subscriber data management system. The transition needed to be transparent to Telcel’s customers and allow for integration of existing (20+) applications such as ringtones, voice mail, and SMS. The new system needed to be able to handle mass data and have very fast response times.  It also needed to be able to rapidly integrate new value-added services. For scalability, reliability, and performance, a new subscriber management system requires tight integration between the hardware (blade server and storage), the database management system, and the applications.

ZTE smoothly migrated Telcel’s legacy platform by adapting non-standard applications that support the LDAP protocol. All implementations of this type require high-quality integration services, and ZTE personnel were on site to help with this transition.

Solution

ZTE’s USPP solution was chosen to provide service-based subscriber data management. Since it was first released in 2006, ZTE USPP has been improved and is now widely used in the market. With a distributed architecture, it leverages a centralized database and provides open interfaces that support standards such as LDAP, MML, SOAP, XML, Web Service, ODBC, and JDBC to facilitate convergence of user data.

ZXUN USPP, based on the ATCA platform, has large capacity. It has 3 racks that can support 100 million dynamic subscribers, and it has low power consumption, which reduces OPEX.  ZXUN USPP supports 12 types of FE applications, which allows for unified UMTS, CDMA, SAE, and IMS services. This, in turn, allows for subscription control convergence. ZXUN USPP simplifies network deployment, accelerates the provision of new services, and promotes service innovation. It helps operators provide competitive integrated services.

Benefits

Telcel’s new data management architecture delivers the desired benefits of a project. ZTE ZXUN USPP is the basis of a modern data management system and has the following benefits:

• high performance. It can handle more than 30,000 transactions per second.
• large capacity. It can accommodate more than 100 million subscribers.
• high scalability of server capacity (ATCA blade server design).
• quick delivery of new services. It has a converged database with unified and open interfaces.
• improved security. It provides flexibility in security profiles and allows access to information on a need-to-know basis so that customer privacy is protected.
• high reliability with hot standby capability and geographic redundancy. It is 99.9999% reliable.
• improved measurement of performance indicators, including memory, CPU, and traffic. This provides a much data about the operation of the platform for easy management.

The system provides distributed memory across different compute blades in the server as well as tight integration with the DBMS software. The new LDAP directory architecture offers more efficient memory use and much faster performance for database queries.

A key benefit is the ability to quickly develop new revenue-generating services for Telcel’s customers. Telcel is in the process of rolling out new services, and the new subscriber management systems greatly reduces the time it takes Telcel to develop, test and integrate a new service. In one case, the time taken to introduce a new service was reduced from 8 months to 2 months. ZTE is helping Telcel integrate new services into the subscriber management system and is enabling future development via training and knowledge transfer.

Telcel is satisfied that its new subscriber data management system will facilitate integration with LTE and new requirements such as machine-to-machine mobile communications. In addition, large capacity, increased performance, and simplified management are very useful to Telcel.