Digicel is the fastest growing GSM provider in the Caribbean, with over 5.7 million subscribers. They decided to expand into Broadband Services and Fixed Voice through WiMAX in order to remain market leaders in the telecommunications marketplace. Digicel had a strict timeline to deployment and needed a billing system that could seamlessly integrate with their back office to provide a single convergent prepaid and postpaid solution across multiple networks and services.
Alepo was chosen to provide the solution using an adjunct approach. “The most important thing for us in choosing a billing partner was proven experience with both GSM and Broadband,” said Mario Aasaad, CTO for Digicel. Digicel chose Alepo to provide the following services:
- Charging
- Rating
- Activation
- Self-care
- Number management
- Provisioning
- Service bundling with GSM plans for both Broadband and VoIP
“We wanted it to be very easy to pair wireless Broadband and VoIP devices with existing mobile plans and to allow our customers to use their existing account (whether a prepaid card or postpaid subscription) to pay for all services offered. By making the activation process intuitive and easy, we increase customer satisfaction and reduce our operational costs,” stated Amilkar Torres, Group Product Delivery Director at Digicel.
Other important considerations were reliability and scalability. “We needed a solution that was reliable and easily scalable to support a company with as high of a growth rate as ours,” said Mr. Assaad.
Alepo engineers integrated with the following legacy systems to create an adjunct back office solution:
- Prepaid IN system
- Postpaid system
- Inventory System
- Mediation System
- WiMAX ASN
- VoIP network
- SMSC
- CRM system
“Communication with the Alepo team was quite good. The advice they gave during implementation was helpful in shaping our project as it moved toward deployment,” explained Mr. Torres. “The Alepo team completed the project in a timely and cost-effective manner.”
Mobile incumbent Digicel wished to increase their customer base and satisfaction by expanding into WiMAX services and offering their existing subscriber base next generation services, but found it necessary to partner with an experienced third party vendor to accomplish their goals within their strict timeline. Through partnership with Alepo, Digicel was able to unify all of their services to one platform and simplify their network, providing bundled GSM, Broadband, and VoIP plans to their subscribers, all with minimal change to the existing core network and agent interface.
