Winners

MTN Côte d’Ivoire

fulfills mission impossible with NGBSS
To improve its network performance, MTN Côte d’Ivoire pulled off an astonishing transformation feat with Huawei’s
NGBSS, making it the most innovative integrated services provider in the country and consolidating its leading
position in the local telecom market.

By Yang Tao Editor: Long Ji longji@huawei.com

Win-Win / SEP 2011

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T
he year 2008 witnessed the telecom
market in Côte d’Ivoire develop rapidly,
with mobile services having since grown
up to 50%. As the most important
integrated services operator in the country, MTN
Côte d’Ivoire is a leader in terms of market share
and subscriber acquisition. Meanwhile, the
operator never stops developing new services to
diversify its service portfolio, which spans CDMA,
ADSL, UMTS, WiMAX, VoIP, and IPTV.
Growing pains
The rapid growth of MTN gave rise to a series
of challenges, though. First, the operator’s IT
architecture became over-complex with its diversity
of services. With dozens of different vendors
running so many components and subsystems,
it lacked the flexibility of having one integrated
platform for delivering business services.
Second, the value-added services of MTN were
not very trusted by and attractive to customers,
resulting in declining customer satisfaction and
threatening customer loyalty. While the operator
expected to improve ARPU by offering attractive
new service packages and cross-sell its products,
its business support system failed to provide the
needed support. Standard changes, such as adding
a new tariff package, often took two months or
more to launch. Moreover, the CAPEX and OPEX
for a new service were prohibitive.
Third, MTN had no unified customer
relationship management system to handle
customer requests and orders and manage its
products. Finally, prepaid and postpaid customers
were billed separately, and customers had no
self-service portal for all their balance checking,
account management, and charging concerns.
An inefficient, inconvenient operating support
system (OSS) was a vexation to MTN and its
customers. As for MTN the operator, the key to
improving ARPU and market share lay in the
integration of network resources on a standard
platform that could seamlessly incorporate
future telecom technologies to quickly develop
new service packages that could satisfy customer
requirements. Convinced that only an integrated
business support system could solve the above
Win-Win / SEP 2011
issues, MTN partnered with Huawei to seek a total
solution, and their partnership led to the Huawei
next-generation business support system (NGBSS).
Milestone in business
operation
MTN chose Huawei for its expertise in the
BSS – ten years of experience plus 35 operators
in 29 countries and 160 million subscribers
served worldwide. The two companies also had a
good history together: Huawei had helped MTN
transfer from its TDM transmission network to
a more efficient and affordable All-IP network in
2008. This move had reduced MTN’s OPEX by
50% while dramatically increasing call quality and
network capacity, all delivered before the deadline.
MTN hoped to continue this strategic
partnership in its efforts to overcome its new
challenges. For this the operator selected Huawei’s
NGBSS, a solution that included the CBS, OCS,
WISG, AAA, IPCC, CCBS, Billing, PRM,
FMS&RA, BI, Mediation/Provisioning, and was
implemented based on the TM Forum Frameworx
standard and Huawei’s best practice.
MTN benefited from the SOA-based integration
framework of the solution, which provided such
components as billing and revenue management,
customer and product management, customer
understanding and value improvement, customer
care improvement and other relevant IT/CT
components, in addition to system integration,
managed services, and professional services. MTN’s
requirements for high performance were fully met
thanks to the solution’s simplicity, convergence,
openness, agility, and intelligence.
MTN overcame the issues of complexity and
redundancy with the legacy architecture, by taking
advantage of the NGBSS’s simplicity represented
by its sleek architecture and efficient business
processes. Thus, the operator streamlined its IT
structure, reduced difficulty in system integration,
and improved operational efficiency.
Assisted by the NGBSS as a convergent system,
MTN achieved convergence in terms of services,
customers, business models and the value chain.
Featuring a unified customer view, QoE, end-to-
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end customer lifecycle management, billing engine,
data model and product management, service
subscription, customer access and mediation,
the solution brought MTN customers consistent
customer care, unified billing, and real-time user
experience.
Also, MTN used the NGBSS as an open
system compliant with the TM Forum Frameworx
standard for realizing high integration and low
coupling between its IT subsystems through the
ESB based on the SOA design philosophy. The
operator benefited from the agility provided by
the solution featuring productization, modularity,
flexible configurations and workflow engines.
Relying on the solution’s capabilities of real-time
analysis and insight, MTN could fully understand
and master the requirements of end users and
develop an effective business strategy so as to
optimize cost and resource efficiency.
Accomplishing the impossible
To make sure that the solution would encompass
all the core functional requirement specifications
(FRS) necessary for all departments’ business
operations, MTN’s CTO and CIO participated in
all meetings side by side with both design teams.
Meanwhile, MTN expected the switchover
to Huawei’s NGBSS to be completed within
nine months of the project kickoff. It was a huge
challenge for the operator, as it not only was a
critical milestone in MTN’s business operations,
but also presented an enormous risk: If subscribers
experienced interruption in regular ser vice
provision after the switchover, they might move to
one of its competitors.
Riding on their positive cooperation and
complete planning, the two partners came to
the project’s moment of truth at 2:00 a.m. on
Monday, August 24th, 2009: the one-time NGBSS
switchover. That moment would determine
whether their efforts over the past nine months had
been worthy.
As MTN’s CEO and CIO looked on, their
IT staff and Huawei’s checked the results. As of
8:00a.m., there had been zero errors for all of
MTN’s subscribers and it was a 100% success rate
Win-Win / SEP 2011
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for testing on all systems. The two design teams
accomplished the impossible. Highlighting FMC,
the new system achieved convergent billing for the
GSM, CDMA and WiMAX networks, creating
a watershed moment in the history of MTN’s
business operations.
Speeding forward
MTN’s one-time switchover to the NGBSS
resulted in a highly-integrated and flexible
architecture. This new architecture gave the
operator an immense array of new competitive
advantages that subscribers responded to with
alacrity. For one, with average time to market
(TTM) reduced from two months to just one
week, the operator was able to rapidly deploy a
string of new high-value services. Within one
month of the commercial launch, MTN deployed
Mobile Money, Mobile TV, MTN Zone, Booster,
Friends & Family Number Extended service,
Blackberry service, and a seamless roaming system
(SRS) that covered all of West Africa.
In addition, the flexibility of the new
architecture combined with MTN’s powerful new
subscriber data collection tools to allow marketing
to roll out many new attractive service plans. In
June 2010, MTN launched advanced custom
packages to individual, family, corporate, and
government account subscribers alike, from hybrid
prepaid and postpaid billing on the same account
to International Roaming Solutions and special
tariffs for voice and wireless data service, friends
and family, and call placement in more than 200
Dynamic Zones.
With MTN providing such convenient and
robust communication and business services
based on the NGBSS, subscriber use surged in
the months following the switchover. In the first
four months of operation, ARPU rose by 40%,
from USD8.00 to USD11.50. MTN’s subscriber
numbers are now growing more than 10% faster
than Côte d’Ivoire as a whole – by December 2010,
the subscribers of MTN Cote d’Ivoire had totaled
six million. Moreover, with the new system built to
international standards, MTN can easily introduce
new technologies.