Customers

• At a glance
• Vignettes
  • SIP Trunking at BT
  • NGIN at Orange Poland
  • IP-Centrex at Portugal Telecom
  • Charging Innovation at Smart
  • Multi-Number at Softbank
  • NGIN at T-Mobile Czech
  • SDP at T-Mobile Slovakia
  • IP-PBX at Telefonica
  • Real-time Charging at Telkomsel
  • MMS-C at Vodafone Spain
  • NGIN at Vodafone Spain
  • Protocol Translation at Vodafone Italy
  • Service Broking at Vodafone Portugal
  • NGIN at Wind Hellas
  • Mobile PBX
  • Open IN SCP
  • Protocol Gateway
  • Number Translation
  • Real-time ToIP

In common with many other mobile telecoms operators, T-Mobile Czech was facing the challenge of how to innovate in their core service offering. Their “big” services were typically delivered by specialised systems. Consequently, the “vertical systems” environment that exists today makes the realisation of new services conceived by the marketing departments extremely difficult, costly and time-consuming.

When considering new and variant services, T-Mobile Czech, like other Operators in today’s harsh business climate, has to produce a business case that shows a return on investment in under a year. Given the complexity and vertical nature of the current environment, this means that most ideas fail at the business case stage. With today’s telecoms networks and equipment, it is almost impossible to adopt the lessons of the internet and create new services, try them, refine them several times and iterate towards something that the customers find useful. The “perpetual beta” model of the internet remains a distant dream rather than a reality.

In 2009, T-Mobile Czech wanted to break out of this chicken and egg grid-lock. They invested in a small capacity, fully-featured Rhino Telecom Application Server and integrated it into their network. This provided them with a platform and full connectivity to all their other equipment and necessary SS7 protocols such as INAP, CAMEL, MAP and Siemens INAP (SINAP). The idea was to have a live platform on which service innovation can take place. This can be done quickly, and cheaply. So that the business case hurdle for service trial and evaluation becomes much easier to satisfy.

Now at T-Mobile Czech, new services can be conceived and piloted to a small focus group of users in a matter of days or a few weeks. The costs of “trying it” have been brought right down so that the marketing group can learn what their customers really think of the new services ahead of the infrastructure and resourcing investments and the associated marketing spend.

To test the concept, T-Mobile Czech implemented a pilot range of services initially. The idea was to see how long the process takes and whether internet innovation inside the telecoms network works.

Each of the services they trialled was implemented and ready to use in under ten working days – many in under five days. User feedback could then be captured and service iterations can take place. The concept proved to be a great success.

T-Mobile Czech is now actively using their Rhino IN innovation platform to test and launch and roll-out new services.