Euskaltel

The Basque Region’s Largest Operator Finds Innovative Ways to Generate New Revenues

Euskaltel is the leading operator in Spain’s Basque region, offering fixed and mobile communications, Internet access and cable television services to residential and business subscribers.

Its distinctive and innovative bundled offerings have spurred its rapid growth to more than 650,000 subscribers.

The Need: To Identify and Develop a Novel Revenue Paradigm

One of the major challenges in the current landscape of telecommunications is the fierce competition that drives providers to be on a constant look-out for new sources of revenue.
With subscriber saturation limiting growth of the user base and with VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) driving down price, operators need to fill the income gaps previously provided by voice revenues. The search for revenue alternatives other than voice is constant and dynamic.

Introducing new services to existing users is a necessary solution, but in addition, Euskaltel became interested in a new and innovative revenue paradigm.

In addition to using its extensive and robust billing capabilities to benefit its own subscribers, Euskaltel sought to offer its billing platform as an outsourced service to a non-competing service provider.

Euskaltel correctly saw this as a way to generate “fail-safe” income.

The Challenge: Acting on an Attractive New Business Model

Leveraging systems already in place by offering them as an outsourced offering can increase revenues without major additional investments, but it is also a challenge for a service provider to act on this bold strategic direction and begin business-to-business (B2B) activities.

Euskaltel first deployed Comverse’s Kenan BP billing engine in 1998 as the backbone for its billing operations to rate and bill its diverse subscriber base receiving a mix of fixed, mobile, Internet access and cable television services.

Further upgrades to the billing platform to add features and expand capacity enabled Euskaltel to accommodate its own needs to attend to a growing, quadruple-play service subscriber base.
Most significantly, it also positioned the operator to consider offering top-flight billing services to other providers.

Euskaltel found a service partner in its outsourced offer — TeleCable de Asturias, a provider of fully integrated data, telephony and cable TV services, targeting more than 300,000 homes and businesses in the area of Asturias, Spain.

TeleCable needed comprehensive billing capabilities, and outsourcing those services from Euskaltel provided a much more attractive business model than acquiring them independently.
The Solution: Outsourcing the Kenan Billing Solution

In 2005, Euskaltel entered a B2B agreement with TeleCable to outsource its Kenan billing solution. TeleCable, upon calculating the cost savings of outsourcing its billing services from Euskaltel, found this to be a preferred approach, rather than integrating a system in-house.

Without large capital expenditures, TeleCable was able to quickly enjoy the benefits of delivering all its services under one billing system to its growing subscriber base.

The outsourced billing system went live in 2006.

Why Selected: Power and Flexibility

As a satisfied Kenan customer for almost a decade, Euskaltel knew that Comverse Kenan BP enables operators to launch new services rapidly, combine offerings, easily reach new markets and capture additional revenue.

The convergent service 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 functions to a core billing platform.

Given the Kenan BP billing platform’s flexibility, Euskaltel was able to quickly adapt its incumbent system to handle the needs of TeleCable.

The Results: One Operator Makes Money, the Other Saves Money

By outsourcing its billing services, Euskaltel has opened a new channel for revenue generation. In turn, TeleCable is now able to meet the evolving needs of its market in a cost-effective manner.
"Getting the maximum from our investment has been our strategy, and leveraging the Comverse Kenan Billing Platform as an outsourced service has generated an excellent revenue alternative.” said Manuel Arco, CIO at Euskaltel.

“We are receiving the market’s cutting-edge billing solution and believe we made the correct cost-analysis by working directly with Euskaltel in this approach,” concluded Jesús Pérez, CTOO at TeleCable.