Changing the Rules in Mobile Communications

an Interview With Mr. Suleiman Maani, CEO, XPRESS

By Waseem Mamlouk,
Sofian Qurashi, Asdaa PR

News&Technology, September 2004

Nestled in the urban landscape of Mecca street’s Shmeisani-5th circle end, there stands a building that will likely become a landmark known to many in the region. XPress, the country’s third mobile operator occupies this space, complete with the latest, state-of-the-art security and administrative facilities. It was here that News and Technology magazine had the recent pleasure of meeting with an extremely visionary and confident individual, CEO Suleiman Maani, to discuss his company’s entry into the world of mobile communications. The company, licensed by the Telecommunications and Regulatory Commission (TRC) as the first public radio trunking service in Jordan and the region has completed the Kingdom’s only Integrated Dispatch Enhanced Network (IDEN) to provide voice, data transport, Global Positioning System (GPS), and many other integrated features of the public. These will eventually include location-based services such as advertising and others that are already quite popular elsewhere.

As Mr. Maani explained, the really significant difference between IDEN and GSM technologies is the walkie-talkie or Push to Talk (PTT) feature. This can be accomplished at the simple push of a button and cuts delivery time down to around 1/10th of that accomplished using hybrid Push over Cell (POC) techniques. Thus, the messages are truly efficient and make conversing on a one-to-one or one-to-many basis simple and easy. Thus far, the CEO sees market feedback as extremely positive. His main base of customers currently includes shippers, government users, and large corporations seeking to take advantage of the corporate packages and cost-savings related to PTT services.

The security aspects of PTT and cellular communications encapsulated in one device have already been tested on Saudi Arabia’s Hajj project. During the Hajj season, IDEN devices were deployed and proved extremely useful in locking down perimeters and maintaining position of personnel and vehicles with regular, cost-saving updates from the field to the central command post. Thus, another application for IDEN could be as a regional command and control tool.

The GPS aspect of IDEN technology will also solve one of the outstanding issues faced by GSM- how to locate a device within a specific range. Previous attempts to do this were met with mixed results as the range could only be brought down to around 40 meters and proved inaccurate, thus minimizing the value-add of such techniques. However, GPS tracking via IDEN is not only possible, but allows for a closer location coordinate and gives organizations the capabilities necessary to track their vehicle fleet, personnel and other key assets with relative ease.

The Main Goal of iDEN is to Improve Communication and Raise Productivity.

Making an Impact

Having brought together a large pool of investors and already employed large amounts of resources to build a costly infrastructure, Xpress will likely seek to capitalize on the low-cost add-on ability of IDEN to grow parallel to market needs. The CEO stressed the greater capacity for productivity and efficiency allowed via IDEN technologies and discussed some of the regional implications of what Xpress has accomplished in Jordan, but the true challenge remains in accessing the market. Indeed, as a first mover, Xpress will enjoy the benefits of being a one-of-a-kind service for some time. However, getting users used to a new way to communicate will indeed be challenging. From what N&T has seen of this up-and-coming operator, it looks like they will be up to the task. In fact, if the CEO is a good measure, look for Xpress to surprise the market with a powerful vision of how mobile users interact.

Over the last year, Xpress has issued several RFPs and completed the above work with the cooperation of their implementation partners. The company hopes to start hosting its own web services in the near future and has already produced XGPS, the application to be used for enabling GPS over IDEN.

The company’s corporate focus made it very important to have a leading edge billing application to help Xpress produce invoices that are easy to read, understand, and contain analysis of which services the customer is currently using most. Also, IDEN has many features and functions that must be tracked by the Customer Care Department. This made it vital to have a competent billing application to meet these needs.

For the billing application, Xpress tapped CBOSS, a Moscow-based GSM and IDEN billing provider to customize an application for the Middle East IDEN market. CBOSS decided to make the investment as they saw some regional potential for the technology. Thus, Xpress was able to produce a booklet-style bill that might eventually become a profit center for the provider. The idea of placing ads in the booklet has already been discussed, for example.

Overall, the Service Level Agreement (SLA) that governs how calls will be handled by Customer Service demands that all incoming requests be answered within 30 seconds. So far, that has been possible and customer satisfaction remains quite high, according to Mr. Mowafi. The challenge will likely lie in maintaining this satisfaction as the customer base grows, and this team appears prepared to overcome any growing pains they might face.

Getting Started

Discussing IT Operations Mr. Amer Mowafi, CIO, XPress.

Managing the IT operations of an IDEN operator in the Middle East is no simple task. The N&T team had an interesting discussion with Mr. Amer Mowafi, CIO and Customei Care Officer for Xpress about what exactly he has to contend with.

One of the most important differences we discovered between Xpress and other operators was the emphasis on customer care. This is not only a priority, but it is integrated with the rest of the CIO's main duties.

After joining Xpress from Nextel USA, Mr. Mowafi was given the chance to help build Xpress' IT operations from the ground up. This involved designing the LAN/WAN architecture, setting up the IVR/ PBX telecom infrastructure, and creating a standard operating system setup that is reliable and efficient. Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard were chosen as the hardware suppliers for the project, and Oracle Financial.