Alcatel MUG 2005, "MVNO Vision", Jean Barrette, Speaker

1. Virtual Lessons Learned
Bell Mobility & MVNO’s
Jean Barrette
General Manager,VASP

2. Presentation Outline
• Bell Canada and Bell Mobility
• Pre-Paid at Bell Mobility
– History
• Supporting MVNO‟s
– What is an MVNO, really . . .
– Why MVNO at Bell Mobility
– Architecture
• Lessons learned
• Benefits of partnership with Alcatel
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3. • Canada‟s largest communications • Bell has 27 million customer connections1
company providing best services to •13M residential and business landlines
•2.5M Consumer internet accesses (1.8M DSL)
residential and business customers in •1.5M DTH satellite
Canada •$19B in revenue (2004, C$)
– Local & LD
– Wireless
– High speed and wireless Internet
– IP-broadband services
– Value added-solutions
– DTH satellite
– VDSL television services
• Key customer segments:
– Bell Canada (100%)
• Consumer.
• Business
– Aliant (53.0%)
– Other Bell Canada
• Wholesale
• Services to rural areas
– Other BCE
• Bell Globemedia (68.5%)
• Telesat (100%)
• CGI (29.5%)
1. Bell Canada Enterprises 2004 Annual report
c
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4. Bell Mobility
• Quick facts
– 5.1 million subscribers1
– >95% population coverage in Ontario and Quebec and 88% of the population in
Atlantic Canada, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver in Western Canada2
– 3,500 employees.
• Services/Technology
– PCS, paging, messaging and mobile data with Alliance partners
– Bell Mobility is CDMA, launching EVDO this year
• Leadership
– Customer satisfaction and loyalty
– Lowest level of customer churn of any major wireless service provider in NA
– First PCS company in NA to put an Internet Browser in the PCS handset
– November 5th, 2001, Deployed 1X next generation wireless data network
(CDMA 1xRTT), a first in Canada.
– First in Canada to launch commercial location-based services and ring back
tones
1 YTD Q2 2005
. 2 Bell Canada Enterprises 2004 Annual report
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c

5. What is an MVNO?
• Several definitions
– “A company that does not own a licensed frequency spectrum, but resells wireless
services under their own brand name, using the network of another mobile phone
operator” 1.
– “A MVNO is a mobile operator that does not own its own network infrastructure. “1
• The current MVNOs supported by Bell Mobility fall into different points
within the range shown below.
– Bell Mobility also offers Prepaid services on a „service bureau‟ arrangement to
partner regional mobile operators. In these cases, the regional operators own their
network, but contract to Bell to provide certain services such as Prepaid billing.
– As Bell Mobility does not operate in all regions in Canada, there exists cooperation
with other regional operators, where Bell offers services on a Service Bureau
arrangement.
Pure Service
MVNE Wholesaling Reseller
MVNO Provider
1 Frost & Sullivan 2005, Yankee 2005
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6. Why MVNO at Bell Mobility?
“Early 2005, the Canadian wireless market was approaching 50% penetration.
Bell positioned as a full service supplier of reliable, fully featured, premium
communication services, including wireless, serving customers across all
segments.
Bell concluded that delivering differentiated wireless offers to drive penetration
and target underserved segments, without confusing customers loyal to the Bell
brand, would require multiple brands.
Bell looked for brands with proven equity among targeted customers, and from
these, we selected those that we thought would be most likely to succeed. We
selected brands that either had a track record of success in mobile, like Virgin,
or established distribution channels, like President's Choice.
In each case, we used the Alcatel prepaid platform to deliver differentiated
offers over the Bell Mobility network.”
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7. Instances of OSP at Bell Mobility
Content
WiFi SMS
Management
Rating Rating
Prepaid
PRBT
Rating Rating
Engine Engine
Media
Resource
Alcatel OSP
Alcatel OSP Alcatel OSP
OSP Connectivity Layer
SAN HPOV EAM EDI MSP WAP-GW MSC AAA SYNAXIS Airwide
LDAP
IVR SMSC
Bridgewater
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8. Virgin Mobile Required Prepaid Efforts
• Alcatel Prepaid platform fully supports MVNOs
– Virtually all modules use the service retailer as one of the primary keys.
– Enables a logical partitioning of the data between each Service Provider
(including Bell, Virgin, Aliant, Sasktel, PC Mobile) and their own rateplans, rates,
vouchers, agents (with access only to their own subscriber‟s data), recurring
charges, etc..
• Introducing Virgin entailed little customized development. The
majority of effort involved configuration work completed internal
within Bell Mobility
– Alcatel customization work:
• Some customizations/scripting to support Virgin‟s unique rateplan req‟ts
• Customized CS interface (WebCP) to support Virgin look and feel for their agents
• Some minor API enhancements to support unique requirements
– Internal Bell work
• Design/requirements work
• Configuration of all Prepaid modules to support Virgin Mobile
• Development/testing of Virgin Mobile offerings/rateplans
• Development/test support of interfaces to Virgin Mobile (primarily Corba interface to
VMC middleware, but also to data warehouse)
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9. Lessons Learned from Virgin MVNO’s
• Complex MVNO‟s require significant work. Except for Alcatel platform, we were and
are not MVNO ready (SMS, VM, CDS, PM, RBT)
• Beware of circular “what do you want….what do you have loop”
– Teamwork between Bell and the MVNO is key
• Large risk on PPD: concurrent projects
• Need for a better „front-door‟ into technology teams and better coordination
between teams. BD approach.
• Priority management between MVNO, specifically when one is a JV
• Funding issues - who pays for what:
– Trigger pays
– MNO pays
– Prorate funding
• Plan for growth
• Plan for an exit strategy
• Choose your MVNO partner wisely
• Choose your vendor wisely: partnership
• Underestimating integration effort between MNO and MVNO back office systems
– Even using proven APIs, integration effort still resulted in 2-3 months of holiday/weekend work (Dec –
Feb) supporting Virgin‟s efforts
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10. Benefits of the Alcatel Partnership
• Security
– Flexible security policy, ability to define what service retailer a user ID is associated with and
limit access specific to service retailer
– Able to define user rights at the create / view / modify / delete level for every object, providing
control and access to MVNO
• Database partitioning
– Users, rate plans, vouchers, recurring charges
• Independent configuration
– Each service retailer can independently configure
• Zoning matrix (LD), rate plans, when and how to notify users, bundles, thresholds, voucher
parameters, recurring charges
• Unique logic for each MVNO via Lite SCE scripts unique to provider
– Multiple access screens and screen formats / layouts for customer service agents. Each
MVNO portal is customized both in terms of look and feel and also in terms of content and
capabilities
• There are no specific hardware requirements to support MVNO. Everything
is fully partitioned in software
• Presence
• Time to market
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11. Benefits of the Alcatel Partnership
BEFORE
Project
Definiti
Deploy
Bell IS/IT
on
ment
Financi
&
al Development (Bell and Vendor)
Testing
Approv
al
5 -15 months
TODAY Proj
ect
Defi
IS/IT (if
nitio Deploymen
required)
n
t
Fina
Customization & Testing
ncial
& Testing (Bell
App
and Alcatel)
rova
l
2 -5 months
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12. Thank You!
Jean Barrette
Jean.Barrette@bell.ca
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