Look Before You Leap

For quite some time, BSNL has been pursuing the strategy of offering all

services under one umbrella. But of late, the realization dawned that offering

all services under one roof without an integrated billing system was fraught

with the imminent danger of losing out to new players in the market. The

challengers, with no legacy system to keep them fettered, can easily deploy

convergent billing systems that can offer value-adds to customers in a highly

competitive market and get a quick head start. Also, BSNL needs to plug in the

huge revenue leakage every year. According to VK Mahendra of BSNL, "The

revenue leakage is to the tune of about Rs 3,000 crore. It is a cumulative

figure, and this is going to become a very dangerous trend in the multi-operator

environment. We have to take steps to plug it."

Given this background, BSNL invited expressions of interest (EoIs) for a call

detail record (CDR) based billing system, in July 2002. By announcing the names

of the 15 short-listed companies in a record two-month time, BSNL has shown that

it means business and is ready to shun any lethargic approach that makes

decision-making a long drawn process. The scale of the project can be gauged

from the fact that it has 17 components to be put in place by the

vendors/integrators, to make the billing system completely convergent. To talk

of precedence, MTNL had undertaken a similar project. Talking about global

parallels, AT&T and MCI had a difficult time integrating that billing

system.

BSNL’s project to convert all meter-based billing to CDR-based billing has

been touted as the single largest initiative anywhere in the world. The company

has plans to connect a projected 60 million lines in five years. Later, plans

are there to integrate all types of services under the CDR system, including

wireless and Internet services. Currently, BSNL has about 40 million lines.

Accepting the need for such a project, Mahendra said, "We realized that the

system that we have is very old and needs changes, though from time to time, we

have adopted changes." It may be noted that in the last seven years, BSNL

has changed its billing system thrice. Parallelly, BSNL has been trying to

integrate the billing infrastructure. And as a part of the process, 35,000

exchanges are being converted to about 2,000 exchanges. According to Mahendra,

" In the last seven years, we have gradually tried to introduce an

integrated system but the integration of various systems that we did was

basically concerned with operations. We have been able to consolidate

operations-related activities and we could do it fairly successfully."

Mahendra is the man spearheading the entire project. He says, "We were

conscious of customers’ increasing demands. Customer care is also very

important." It was felt by the management of BSNL that the system that it

had was not enough to cope up with the increase in the competition. Mahendra

spells out frankly, "Being a monopoly company, we had certain inherent

drawbacks. No marketing organization was existing and when the word marketing

was spelt out, we had only one concept of it that is reduction in tariff."

Mahendra also feels that with the entry of every new operator, BSNL was

losing customers and so it was important for it to change the system. Many

apprehensions have been raised regarding the implementation. Experts say that

BSNL does not have any blueprint in place and is yet to work out the network

architecture before going in for such a massive project.

An ideal billing system for BSNL, according to Arun Agarwal of Comptel, would

be one that caters to multiple services, is scalable so as to handle a large

base, and is open to integration with numerous network elements and

applications. Considering the complexity of network infrastructure and systems

integration in deploying an effective OSS, BSNL’s task won’t be easy. But

one should be hopeful of its successful completion, given the new competitive

environment and the urge to acquire more.

Sudesh Prasad/Voice&Data