BSNL Karnataka - CDR''s Incubation Hub

Sudesh Prasad

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.

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).

Source: Dataquest