Orange
The FT/Orange group is one of the world’s largest mobile and fixed-line communications companies, with operations in 17 countries. Aepona is the strategic supplier of its Next-Generation IN Platform to the FT/Orange group as a whole, as well as its affiliates in Poland, France, the UK, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal.
w-HA
Orange Group UK and France, a subsidiary of the France Telecom group covering all its mobile telephone activities, uses the w-HA network, which is powered by Aepona’s payments technology, to sell enhanced content and services to customer using prepaid and postpaid accounts as well as credit cards. Orange created a digital content and services shopping mall experience which is off-portal, called Gallery, which enables a variety of third party providers to offer goods and services via a WAP, Web, MMS-based interface and supports a variety of payment methods.
Case Study: Orange Poland
Introduction
For many service providers these days, it’s very much a case of not being able to choose the cards that they’ve been dealt, in terms of their legacy network and IT systems. Historic investments – made for very good reasons at the time – can now limit their freedom to respond to rapid organizational and market change. What a few years ago was a fairly straightforward game, with only a limited number of options for play and a high degree of independence, has now for many operators turned into a complex strategic challenge, more akin to contract bridge than the simpler games of old.
For Orange Poland, a mobile operator who had already been through a number of incarnations before becoming part of the Orange Group in September 2005, one of their main recent challenges has focused on adapting their Intelligent Network infrastructure to deal with new operational and commercial conditions. Like many service providers, they acquired and then integrated a number of different IN and IT systems in recent years, creating in the process a complex cat’s cradle of functions and resources to deliver services such as pre-paid and Virtual Private Networks to their domestic and business customers. However – just like many other service providers – an urgent need was now growing to rationalise these systems to save costs, introduce new services, speed time to market and be able to interwork more closely with their parent company.
Their solution? The adoption of Aepona’s Service Broker to simplify their service architectures and make it possible to offer ever far richer service sets to both pre- and post-paid customers while still protecting much of their existing investment. In addition, while their decision to go with Aepona was taken independently, the fact that their parent company – the France Telecom / Orange Group – is already an Aepona customer will make the introduction of truly globalised, advanced services even easier in the future.
History
The origins of Orange Poland begin back in 1991 when PTK Centertel (Polska Telefonia Komórkowa – Polish Cellular Telephony) was created by state-owned incumbent Telekomunikacja Polska S.A. as the first mobile operator in that country. Launched initially using NMT-450 technology, PTK introduced GSM services in 1998 – and now has a full portfolio of GPRS, EDGE and 3G-based access technologies.
While the State retains a small shareholding, Orange Poland is now part of the France Telecom group and is one of the main 3 operators in Poland. During 2005 it had approximately 3,600 employees and served about 9 million customers.
When it first launched its GSM network in 1998 it was using switching infrastructure from Nokia and radio infrastructure from Nokia & Nortel. Recognizing the importance of being able to offer VPN services to corporate customers, the company also invested in an IN solution from Nokia that would be able to interwork with an internally developed billing platform and use early location-based information to offer HomeZone type services.
Shortly after that, the decision was also taken to deploy a second IN platform from Unisys to support pre-paid customers and fulfill the growing demand from domestic customers for reliable communications.
Tomasz Lawicki, who led the team who planned and implemented the architecture at Orange Poland takes up the story, “Anyone who’s ever been involved with IN will appreciate the kinds of problems that we faced in getting all our systems working together reliably and effectively – and in the way we wanted, not the way the vendor did! IN systems at that time took what might politely be called an ‘open proprietary’ approach and, given the scarcity and costs of the necessary expertise and a reluctance to really cooperate in resolving problems, we found vendor relationships somewhat problematical….. “These difficulties were compounded by nature of the pre-paid traffic we were carrying at the time as the population got used to using mobile communications. Because call tariffs were quite high at the time, many people would only make very short calls – but traffic could all too easily reach very high levels at peak times of the day as people called home from work. It was essential therefore that we had to effectively oversize the platforms to cope with this.”
Around late 2001, the company decided to look at consolidating its IN platform with one vendor and so, as a trial, brought Lucent into play as a prime contractor to supply its DNCP (Distributed Network Control Platform) along with a system from eServGlobal to handle pre-paid transactions.
Orange’s Lawicki continues the story, “Although we were hoping for major improvements on the old systems we found we were running across similar problems to do with proprietary architectures, old IT concepts and general instability – not exactly what you want from a market that’s getting increasingly competitive and when a large proportion of your target customers are business users.
“By 2003 we’d decided that we’d had enough and, with truly open standards like Parlay having arrived, we thought that we might finally find an approach to rationalize the almost organic complexity that we’d reached with our IN, billing and database systems. While we had left our pre-paid system running on the Lucent/eServ platform, our biggest headache here was in the cost of introducing new services. Any good telecommunications engineer knows that everything ultimately connects to everything else – and the implications of that can leave you subject to your vendor’s own product strategies as they issue new software releases.
“Ultimately, you can get trapped into having to pay a great deal just for simple changes to a few software parameters – or have to pay for ultimately unnecessary upgrades just to keep the whole system alive.”
Tomasz and his team began to consult with their colleagues in Orange UK who, having faced similar problems, had also begun work to explore the benefits of a more open network strategy using OSA (Open Service Access) principles – and an Aepona platform.
“An OSA platform seemed to be something that we needed,” says Tomasz, “and, while we did check out relevant offerings from Telcordia, Alcatel and Lucent, we decided to go with Aepona after a rigorous appraisal of the market. We’d already moved our customer directory data onto Sun servers to provide the essential LDAP information, so at least some of the system infrastructure was in place for a more open strategy.”
The idea that both Orange Poland and Orange UK had been working towards was the concept of the Service Interaction Function (SIF) – a new ‘building block’ that could handle the necessary multi-triggering of different processes across the all the different systems within the overall network. As service offerings become more complex and are increasingly composed of multiple service components – such as offering a Pre-Paid HomeZone VPN service using location data – information has to be exchanged extremely rapidly between the systems that hold this information and control the actual call set up, take down and charging mechanisms. While many of the major network equipment vendors claim such functionality exists within their products, these can suffer from the same closed proprietary approaches that have long affected the IN world. Tomasz Lawicki expands on these issues: “Everyone in the telecoms world these days is facing the same sets of issues – how to manage the exchange of data between increasingly distributed systems and synchronize that exchange in such a way that the customer isn’t left waiting while the necessary rules and logic for authentication and call set-up are dealt with. When you’re choosing a method of resolving these issues you also have to keep a close eye on the horizon to also anticipate the impact of moving from SS7 to SIGTRAN and, of course, of introducing softswitch architectures.”
