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Overall Best IT Project : Bharti Airtel : Unified GIS

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PCQ Bureau
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A In a hyper competitive environment, the need of the hour for Airtel was to

prioritize expansion of its mobile and broadband network roll outs in potential

tier — 1, 2&3 cities and clusters as well as in rural India. There was also a

need to connect its urban and rural networks to provide the same quality of

services to both types of subscribers. The challenge in doing such an expansion

lies in getting the correct demographics of all regions. That's because in the

telecom sector, a well-planned network roll has to be in sync with market

demand. It helps gain better coverage, and results in faster turnaround time

while doing customer feasibility and acquisition, because decisions can be taken

faster by sales and marketing. And for a company like Airtel, which has more

than 1 lakh mobile sites serving its 137 million subscribers, and 1.18 lakh kms

of fiber laid across 100 cities and serving more than 3 million fixed line

subscribers across the country, the task of identifying further expansion is no

mean task. That's where the concept of setting up a unified GIS network came up,

and since it impacted the entire operations of Airtel, across all divisions, it

brought immense benefits to the organization. It has all the ingredients we look

for in a winning project. There was immense business impact, a very large scale,

technical complexity, ingenuity, as well as social impact, and some element of

green IT. It scored high across all parameters, due to which our jury adjudged

it as the overall best IT project for 2010.

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The Unified GIS System.



Airtel already had a network monitoring and management system to keep a tab of
its network, but this could not help identify potential areas for further

expansion and business growth. In order to make this happen, Airtel deployed a

unified GIS system, which is a single view not only to Airtel's own network, but

to the entire landbase of India covering all six lakh villages, cities, major

highways and railroad networks. These are further integrated with Airtel's own

OSS ecosystem to cater to daily business and operational needs.

Overall Best IT Project

Company Scenario
Before Deployment
  • Manual field surveys done for site analysis for

    network expansion.

  • Slow response to customer queries.

  • Manual tracking of network inventory.

What was deployed

 

A unified GIS that mapped India's landbase,

Airtel's network inventory for both wired and wireless businesses, and the

OSS processes and applications..
After Deployment  
  • One view of the entire country's landbase, covering

    all 35 states and UTs, national highway and railroad networks, as well as

    terrain mapping.

  • One view of the entire network down to the last

    mobile tower with height, mounted antennae, their specs, range, etc.

  • Integration with business apps to draw out meaningful

    data for advanced provisioning, customer support, and network planning.

Implementation partners - IT Partner: IBM,

SIs: Infotech, Lepton
 

The benefits of having this kind of a view are quite understandable--with

lower ARPUs, gaining visibility into the network helps improve its utilization,

which in turn reduces costs, improves profitability, and ultimately gives a

better experience to the customers. It also helps plan future expansions better.

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Landbase mapping



Airtel has done a pretty extensive landbase mapping of the country, using data
from both field surveys, satellite imagery, as well as other sources like the

public domain data from the Census Board of India. Essentially, it covers all 35

states and UTs of India, which is further broken down by districts, talukas,

towns, 6L+ villages, and 91,000 kms of highways and 65,000 kms of railways

tracks. All the major buildings, landmarks, establishments and major roads in

all the major cities are covered in this. Within each building also, every floor

and offices/flats on each are also covered. Not only that, but the different

types of terrains (mountains, lakes, water bodies, etc) are also covered in the

landbase mapping.

Ramamurthy Kolluri, VP Networks-OSS

Bharti Airtel

Q What according to you is the USP of the project?



The implementation is one of its kind which supports both wireless and

wireline inventory with a capacity of handling India's largest telecom

network and can seamlessly add future technologies, realizing 'Tomorrow's

Network Today'.

Q What were the key business benefits gained after having deployed

this project?



Automation has brought down response time from days to a few minutes

that helps in faster resolution of customer queries. Tag on SMS feature

helped field teams to get latest resource availability thus significantly

reducing cancellation of customer orders. Real time Network Information on

PDAs of field engineers has brought down resolution time of customer

complaints. A 360-degree view of network of all lines of business helped in

initiating many synergy projects. The high precision right of way

information along with a country-wide road network data helped in reducing

the CAPEX involved in field survey. Pan India urban and rural spatial

information enriched with demographics helped in identification of clusters

for network expansion opportunity and retailer/distributor planning.

Network mapping



As we already explained earlier, all mobile sites and fixed line network

have been mapped on top of the landbase GIS. The level of detail that Airtel has

gone to is amazing. Every mobile tower along with its attributes such as height,

electronic equipment, number of antennas their power and direction have been

covered in this GIS map.

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Integration with OSS and business apps



Airtel has integrated its landbase and network mapping with its internal
processes, and various business apps. This has automated a lot of processes,

thereby helping the company to do advanced analytics and trending, reducing

customer complaints by fault localization and alarm mapping, better feasibility

studies by integrating the physical inventory to the bandwidth information, and

even empowering the field force for better incident management.

How it empowers



As can be imagined, the possibilities of what one can do with such a system

are endless. The system is accessible through both a thick client as well as a

web browser. Everything is on the map, allowing the user to drill down into any

particular region in the country. This helps Airtel do feasibility studies,

advanced provisioning, coverage planning, etc. In a city for instance, they

could identify how far from a particular building is their fiber line, and

determine whether they can provide broadband access to its residents or not. In

tower planning, they can identify all the hurdles like mountains, water bodies,

etc well in advance, and then determine the tower height, type of antenna

required, etc. They can even see the coverage that would be provided by a

particular antenna well in advance.

Earlier when Airtel had to plan its network expansion or

lay out optical fiber in a specific area, they had to send a field engineer to

the site for capturing the information about the terrain manually. Then the

field report for the same was manually prepared and sent to the network planning

teams. This information was in disparate forms including map images,

consolidated documents and Excel sheets. This disparate information was then

converted to a meaningful format and entered into a CRM from where it was made

accessible. With this system, Airtel saves on the cost of conducting these field

surveys such as travel cost of field engineers, delays due to the manual report

preparation, etc.

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A deep dive into specific buildings,

towers, and fiber network in Connaught Place, New Delhi with Unfied GIS

system

Airtel has also deployed an SMS based service for their

broadband field force, which helps them identify available network inventory.

This way, they go better prepared for resolving customer complaints. Plus, the

sales and marketing team can also identify unused broadband inventory, and

create opportunities to sell those.

The end result



As can be imagined, such a system impacts everyone in Airtel and its

customers. The response time to customer queries for instance, has reduced from

a few days to minutes. The SMS feature helps the field engineers determine

resource availability in advance, thereby reducing cancellation orders.

There are financial savings as well of course, which have

resulted from this 360-degree view of the network. It has reduced the capex

requirements for conducting field surveys, and helped elimination of duplication

in manpower cost.

Automated tools help determine the shortest path in network

planning, which saves a lot of time. There's a social impact as well, because it

reduces space and power usage by doing site consolidation where required.

Automation of so many processes has also led to reduction in paper usage.

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