Telecom: BSNL Karnataka - CDR's Incubation Hub

With BSNL Karnataka's cellular subscriber base touching 15.7
lakh (as of January '06), DataOne subscribers, totaling 62,352, and its plan
to add two lakh broadband connections by the year end, the challenge will lie in
living up to the expectation of the customers in timeliness and quality of
delivery of services. Having telecom equipment from leading vendors is not
sufficient to manage the explosive growth of demand for various services. BSNL
Karnataka, through its well planned IT strategy, has managed to meet the growing
needs of its customers. RK Upadhyay, DGM (IT), BSNL Karnataka said, "We are
focusing on creating IT infrastructure for VAS and broadband services as the
demand is growing."

Talking about Karnakata being chosen to play host to proof of
concept phase for implementation of all the software solutions along with the
networking components, he says, "We are very excited about the project and
hope we live up to the expectations." This will be followed by the roll out
phase which involves rolling out the entire application and infrastructure stack
for CDR based billing and customer care system.

	'We are focusing on creating IT infrastructure for VAS and broadband services as the demand is growing'
	-RK Upadhyay, DGM (IT), BSNL, Karnataka

It should be noted that BSNL has floated one of the world's
largest tenders, and aims to upgrade its billing network by converting them to
CDR-based system that are to be front ended by the leading system integrators.

BSNL plans to dump its multiple, decentralized, older billing
systems, and replace them with a single integrated system. These would be
centralized at six locations-two in south, two in west, and one in north and
east, respectively. Two regional locations in south and west and in north and
east would serve as backups to each other.

Implementation of SAN

It is also part of the whole exercise and will be implemented at four
proposed data centers of CDR based customer care and convergent billing system.
For this, BSNL aims to procure SAN infrastructure and storage capacity as per
the requirements of the data centers and roll out the SAN infrastructure along
with other infrastructure. This involves deployment of SAN for centralized CDR
based customer care and convergent billing systems with supporting technological
and communication infrastructure. Talking of an all India picture, with the
completion of the project, BSNL aims to implement the CDR based billing and
customer care solution at these four zones and data centers.

SAN equipment would be set up in two stages. Stage one involves
setting up of SAN equipments including software, hardware and allied components
which amount to 40% of the total storage capacity. The rest would be in stage
two.

The main challenge before BSNL Karnataka is that a large
percentage of exchange is C-DoT based which means it can generate CDRs only for
STD/ISD calls apart from the risk of service disruption and revenue leakage. To
take care of this problem, BSNL plans to run both the meter based billing and
CDR-based billing, simultaneously before the system is geared only for CDR. B
BSNL feels that the project will ring in more revenues and check the massive
leakage that it has been subjected (an estimate puts the figure at Rs 3000
crores accumulated over the last few years).

Sudesh Prasad

sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in