Turkish fiber-optic network operator Turkcell Superonline last year started streamlining its back-office systems in a bid to boost revenue by 35%.
The firm turned to Oracle Communications to improve its fiber-to-the-building order management and service fulfillment capability, and says the approach will boost its ability to roll out converged services on other access technologies, including fiber to the cabinet and home, and xDSL, by separating the service from the underlying technology.
Ibrahim Gokalp, Turkcell Superonline’s network systems manager, claims the new approach could slash the time taken to deploy new services by up to 75%, by decoupling the commercial products from the underlying network technologies. The system currently handles 32,000 orders per month, 875,000 service locations and 40,000 points-of-presence.
The problem
Turkcell Superonline had three main goals when it enlisted Oracle: to enable it to create services independent of the access technology used; to offer fast order fulfillment times amid growing competition; and to improve its overall customer service by cutting the number of orders that fell out of the system.
The company operates 28,000 km of fiber backbone offering wholesale, corporate and residential services in ten Turkish cities, including the capital Ankara and Istanbul, the country’s largest city. The firm has pumped at least a billion Turkish lira ($531 million) into its fiber network over the past four years, resulting in typical residential download rates of 15.8 Mbps – more than double Turkey’s average of 6.1 Mbps -- and data rates of up to 1000 Mbps in some areas.
Since its foundation as a subsidiary of telco Turkcell in 2004, the operator had developed a centralized system covering order capture and generation, customer service, lifecycle management, provisioning and network inventory. The applications were linked by direct point-to-point connections between the hub and the remainder of Turkcell Superonline’s IT architecture.
The operator's existing custom set-up made it hard to amend IT systems because all changes had to be run through the hub -- lengthening time to market for new commercial services, which had to be cleared via the core several times to cover the different access technologies used. The system also provided limited visibility into the status of orders and losses, and had little in the way of data security.