Zhejiang Telecom – Moving Quickly to Meet High Demand
Zhejiang Telecom Company Limited was created in the year 2000 as a subsidiary of China Telecom, the country’s incumbent telecommunications operator. As China Telecom’s third largest subsidiary, the carrier provides broadband data and voice services to the entire province of Zhejiang, where close to 50 million people reside in an area of 100,000 square kilometers. Its service offering to its subscriber base of 26 million includes, wireless local loop, voice over IP, data, graphics, multimedia communications and information services.

Zhejiang Telecom views data service as a revenue generator and has been building up broadband IP networks across the province since June 2001.

The Need: Cut Down and Do More
Zhejiang Telecom was in a bind. It needed to improve operational efficiency by converging all of its billing systems into one system that would issue a single bill for multi-service customers.  At the same time, Zhejiang Telecom had to meet the demand from its parent company, China Telecom that all its subsidiaries run one bill cycle per month within a very short window, while generating bills for all subscribers.

Few vendors can reliably execute this challenge when dealing with the voluminous number of Zhejiang’s subscribers. This need to consolidate all back-office systems to support convergence took upon a particularly pressing need in light of the parent company’s plans for an upcoming 3G rollout.  

The Challenge: Many Bills – One Short Cycle
At the present level of 26 million subscribers, enabling a single complete bill cycle within a short turnaround time is equivalent to having a single system with 100 million accounts spanning 10 bill cycles. In parallel to expecting this record-breaking processing, Zhejiang Telecom was looking to reduce operational expenditures through back-office consolidation and increase revenues with enhanced revenue assurance capabilities.

Robust Solution: Comverse Kenan FX
The exceptionally rapid growth of the Chinese telecommunications market required Zhejiang Telecom to find a flexible and scalable billing solution that would support quick deployment of new products and services. In addition to replacing and combining the legacy platforms into one platform, the goal was to offer value-added services and flexible payment methods to their customers now and upon moving to next-generation networks.
The Comverse Kenan FX solution enables operators to launch new services rapidly, combine offerings, easily reach new markets and capture additional revenue.  The multi-service convergent platform provides high-powered rating, account balance management and billing capabilities for easy management of a diverse customer base. It incorporates a robust data model with intuitive configuration tools that allow quick implementation of new services. Implementing Kenan FX helps operators realize long-term savings due to faster handling of transactions and a more accurate and better quality billing output to subscribers. 

Why Selected: Meeting the Challenge and More
Zhejiang Telecom chose Comverse’s Kenan FX framework because they required a stable, high-performing and centralized solution that could cater to their complex needs of high subscriber volume, multiple service offerings and bill cycle throughput requirements that were set by the parent company, China Telecom.
The Kenan FX customer care, ordering and billing solution is optimized for the converging communications market and provides an advanced set of customer lifecycle management capabilities — from ordering and activation to charging and payments — to support a host of communication services.
Kenan FX has an impressive resume of deployment with over twenty tier one operators and more than 150 service providers throughout 57 countries.  Kenan FX has been proven to handle large volumes; it can support up to 100 million subscribers and can support the rating and tracking of more than a billion records per month.

Extraordinary and Award-Winning Results
Today, the Kenan FX system deployed in Zhejiang supports 12 million business and residential accounts, covering five cities – all in a single system. When all the migrations and conversions are completed, this single bill cycle will have 20 to 25 million accounts. The results are extraordinary – a single instance processes 175 invoices a second (or 10,500 a minute) during a bill run that handles 10 million accounts enhanced with features such as marketing promotions and discounts. By the close of 2006, 10 million bills were generated across 15 databases covering five cities, including the provincial capital Hangzhou, within 24 hours.

Zhejiang Telecom required a complex solution with a high degree of convergence, consolidation and replacement of a number of legacy systems. The operator provides local, long distance, high-speed lines, Internet and multimedia services for its more than 26 million subscribers on their existing systems, and plans for migration to next-generation networks.  

Kenan FX has proved its robust features and power by handling this huge subscriber base well within the processing speed constraints, while still enabling multi-service convergence and long-term transformation.