Client

TalkNet Mobile Solutions, an industry leader in the development and manufacturing of Corporate GSM Telecommunication Solutions, South Africa.

Challenge

Striving to provide customers with outstanding service, TalkNet decided to create a number of applications to embrace mobile network operator's framework and cover different aspects of the mobile operator's functionality. The company realized that they needed an IT partner to outsource the solution to. The project objectives were as follows:

Objective 1.
Creating an online billing system to process incoming Call Data Records (CDRs) containing call details and calculate the cost of each call. Different rate plans, time of call, number of free minutes, and other details had to be taken into account.

Objective 2.
Designing a web-based customer account management system for administrative personnel. A web-based interface was to be provided to help call center agents retrieve client information quickly from the central server.

Objective 3.
Creating an application for automated processing of incoming SMS messages from different SMS gateways and forwarding them to an appropriate destination.

Objective 4.
Creating a fax sending and fax receiving application.

Objective 5.
Developing a web-based inventory tracking system to help customer service personnel keep record of the inventory available in the store and control the process of taking orders from the customers and distributing the ordered goods from the warehouse to the stores.

Solution

We developed a powerful application which is able to process large amounts of data to calculate the cost of each call in the VOICE, DATA, SMS, MMS, and GPRS categories dependig on the rating plan, the time of the call, the number dialed, and on other parameters. The engine takes into consideration all discounts provided to the customers and makes it possible to differentiate between on-peek / off-peak days and time periods, calculating the rates accordingly.

To facilitate the work of the call center agents, we created an interface which has various screens showing the details of the account when the client account number or billing number is entered. The interface shows all transactions, statement history, daily and monthly totals, invoices, itemized billing information, and carry over values. The application is also able to generate reports on various kinds of account information. It can operate over slow GPRS connections.

To make the process of sending and receiving SMS messages more efficient, we created software which connects to the SMSC Server via the SMPP protocol, receives SMS messages from a mobile network, and relays it to the destination SMSC server. The software supports multiple SMSC Interfaces with different settings. It has significantly simplified the process of sending SMS messages which now consists of a few simple steps: logging into the database, checking if there are any messages to send, sending them to the proper gateways and marking them as sent, receiving new messages and delivery notifications, and saving them to the database.

We developed a server application which automatically sends outgoing faxes submitted by the operator and receives incoming faxes, storing them in the database. Several instances of the application can work with the same database and send / receive faxes that have specific phone prefixes only, reducing the cost of calls.

Technologies Utilized

• Windows NT/2000 Server, Apache, Sybase 9.1
• PHP 5.0, C++, SQL

Results

The implemented system of applications is extremely reliable and targets high availability. It has made the performance of the mobile operator more efficient. The facilitated processes of calculating call rates, sending faxes and SMS messages, and viewing the account information have enabled the mobile operator to improve the quality of services provided to the customers and contributed to higher customer satisfaction.

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