Cellco gears up for further growth

Eastern European Wireless Communications #6, June-July 2004

In response to rapid subscriber growth in its regional operations, MTS has signed extensions to its existing user-license agreements with CBOSS Association, for a range of the latter’s billing and value-added service (VAS) solutions.
Serving the Orlovskaya, Kurskaya, Belgorodskaya, Lipetskaya, Voronezhskaya and Bryanskaya regions of Russia, MTS subsidiary Rekom, has announced a ’significant’ increase in the number of licenses for CBOSS products installed on its network.
The operator’s OSS billing system capacity has been increased to cater for 1.2-million subscribers (up from 700 000), while similar upgrades for a range of VAS have been implemented. These include the CBOSS Automatic Customer Care and Internet Customer Service systems — also up from 700 000 to 1.2-million subscribers; plus Voice/Fax Mail System — which has been increased to serve 200 000 subscribers (up from 150 000).
In addition, Rekom is to increase the capacity of its Internet Sales Point ’remote dealer’ system, short message system and WEB-enabled CBOSSsms solution. The mdDrive external resources management system, and udr — a user-defined reports system -are also included under this contact, as are a range of other products.
According to CBOSS spokesman, Alexander Petrusevich, Rekom was very successful last year, doubling its existing subscriber base to more than 750 000 customers. The operator expects to maintain this growth rate this year, which is why it has extended its user licence agreements for its billing and VAS systems, he says.
The extension, which commenced last month (June), entailed the provision of a software key enabling these VAS solutions to serve more subscribers, plus hardware upgrades to the operator’s Sun Fire RISC-server and data storage system.
Meanwhile, a similar deployment has taken place at MTS’ Sverdlovskaya (Ural) region network, where the CBOSS billing system, Automatic Customer Care, Internet Customer Service, Internet Sales Point ’remote dealer’ and mdDrive systems have been given capacity increases from 500 000 to 1.2million subscribers.
The contract also calls for the extension of the operator’s voice/fax mail system (CBOSSvmail) configuration from 100 000 to 500 000 subscribers, as well as an increase in the SMS centre’s traffic capacity from 50 to 100 messages per second.
Designed for recording, storing and managing subscribers’ voice and facsimile messages, CBOSSvmail provides a subscriber with a multichannel, feature-rich answering machine service hosted by the operator.
As a result of this project, MTS subscribers in Yekaterinburg and Sverdlovskaya district will also now be able to benefit from the popular Friends&Family option from MTS which enables each subscriber to create their own groups of ’privileged’ (i.e. lower-cost) numbers.