TCS Case Study at eTel Austria

Client description

eTel is a fast developing international telecom operator and carrier with operations in several European countries providing a range of voice and IP services to residential and corporate customers and also to other operators. eTel firmly believes that a good QoS is essential to remain ahead competition.

Problem description

A faster rate on traffic prices from carriers puts a higher pressure on the commercial department to put traffic on the once providing best margin. A risk is that the quality (ASR) is not as advertised by carriers or that the transmission, speech and fax quality is below acceptable levels on chosen carriers. It is very time consuming to validate that the QoS is at expected standard on each carrier and destination.

Verifying reported complaints or discover quality drops not detected by normal SS7 monitoring is very resource demand. Many times the SS7 monitoring sends false quality drop alerts on destinations because of single number failures.

Comprehensible and detailed figures on QoS are hard and time consuming to obtain from existing tools and systems.

What TCS provided

The TCS system was installed at eTel’s office in Austria. The purpose was to perform tests of routes and destinations prior to LCR modifications. TCS was configured to fast validate the routes and provide detailed and precise QoS reports of the new LCR. TCS also enable operations, helpdesk and commercial departments to make ad-hoc testing on reported faults or with customers on the phone at the help desk and take out reports on destinations and carriers. TCS was also configured to, on a regular basis, test the most important destinations for their operations to provide a picture of the on-going QoS and trends with a wide range of quality indicators such as voice quality (ITU MOS Score), fax, ISDN (64kbps unrestricted) and ASR.

Results

The TCS system was installed and utilised by the departments as planned and had a propounded impact on QoS. The number of trouble tickets was reduced by 75% after one-month usage of TCS. The sales department received spontaneous feed back from the customers on improved service. The improved QoS increased the staff efficiency, less fire fighting and more time on improving service and margin. eTel is now planning to deploy the system through out the other European offices.

Christian Köhler Network Operations Manager eTel Austria AG We are very satisfied with TCS. It has met and passed our expectations, especially in usability and flexibility. It enabled us to gain our QoS as our customers expected and helped us to maintain our gross margin. Additionally we could improve the churn rate.