TMN selects Openet Telecom for pre-paid GPRS & UMTS data services
febrero 19, 2002 - Openet
19 February, 2002 Openet Telecom; Openet Telecom, the world leader in convergent mediation, today announced that it is providing FusionWorks™ Mediation and FusionWorks™ Pre-paid to TMN the wireless operator subsidiary of Portugal Telecom as a foundation for its accelerated deployment of next-generation pre-paid and post-paid services.
TMN is Portugal's incumbent wireless operator with a subscriber base of over 3.5 million GSM subscribers, 80% of which are pre-paid. TMN plans to roll out GPRS services in 2002 and to acquire up to 300,000 GPRS subscribers within the first year before rolling out UMTS in 2003/4. In order to be able to meet these targets TMN saw the need for a full review of its mediation, pre-paid, rating and billing requirements. Accenture were appointed to provide independent consultancy and provided TMN with a short list that included Openet Telecom in partnership with Convergys.
"We selected Openet's advanced mediation and pre-paid data platform to enable us to roll out GPRS services to our predominantly pre-paid subscriber base," commented Eugenio DaSilva, CIO at TMN. "Fusionworks Mediation, coupled with the new FusionWorks™ Pre-paid platform, will allow us to roll out our GPRS services to all of our customers, maximising service use and new revenue potential" added DaSilva.
FusionWorks™ Mediation and FusionWorks™ Pre-paid will be deployed in partnership with Convergys and will handle pre-paid and post-paid services within the GSM and GPRS service infrastructure. The ability of the FusionWorks™ products to handle diverse networks and associated operational, business and decision support systems means that TMN can collect usage data in real-time from legacy GSM and new GPRS packet overlay network technologies and deliver innovative wireless data services to their entire customer base. FusionWorks™ will interface with network elements from Openwave, Comverse, Alcatel, Siemens and Unisys in the first phase of the project.
"Providing wireless data services over GPRS or UMTS networks to pre-paid subscribers is a new challenge facing wireless operators," commented Joe Hogan, CTO of Openet Telecom. "Next-generation pre-paid data platforms are a different breed of mediation system. They are real time event driven systems that are capable of operating in-service in conjunction with existing intelligent network elements within wireless networks. Openet has engineered a pre-paid data platform that takes full advantage of the existing features of the carrier grade FusionWorks™ Mediation framework, and at the same time has incorporated the features required to allow for the solution to operate as an in-service network element responsible for real-time pre-paid credit control and balance management."
Hogan continues, "FusionWorks™ Pre-paid can be integrated into existing GPRS and voice infrastructure to authorise transactions while the wireless subscriber uses the network. It also has the ability to recognise what data to filter out, which partial records to aggregate, how to associate which events to which, when to enrich the output record and then how to rate in real-time, in order for pre-paid balances to be decremented in line with service usage."
The FusionWorks™ Mediation and FusionWorks™ Pre-paid products act as the foundation that integrates TMN's diverse network elements, underpinning its operational, business and decision support systems as well as preparing TMN for the addition of GPRS and UMTS elements.
About TMN
TMN is a 100% subsidiary of Portugal Telecom, constituted in 1991 as a Mobile Telecommunications specific unit. With more than 3.900.000 clients and a market-share approaching 50% TMN is clearly Portugal's biggest mobile telecom company. Throughout time TMN has been working collaboratively with Portugal Telecom sister companies, regarding technology, content development and solution sharing in order to strengthen their business capabilities; as proved by previous breakthroughs such as MIMO, the world's first pre-paid product.
About Openet
Openet is a leading worldwide provider of event processing and transaction management solutions. The Transactional Intelligence of the company's solutions extracts increased value from diverse service provider networks, enabling rapid introduction of new services and reliable, cost-effective management of existing services. Openet is focused on delivering best-in-class network edge solutions and specialized engagement processes that create business value from network activity. A global company, Openet's implementations include long-running engagements with the world's leading service providers such as British Telecom, Orange, AT&T and Verizon Wireless. For more information, visit www.openet.com.
