Russian Network Expands VaS to the Regions

Twelve million subscribers of the BeeLine Network that covers over 55 regions of Russia have now access to various value added services supplied by content-providers. Until recently these services were available in Moscow and the Moscow region only.

The SPACE platform by Bercut controls all VAS-traffic. At the first stage of implementation the platform was handling VAS-traffic in Moscow and the Moscow region. This stage of operation that lasted about six months proved the platform's high performance and reliability. On the operator's decision, Bercut increased the platform performance from 20 up to 100 messages per second, which was due to a growing popularity of VAS. Now, Vimpelkom has connected the platform to its regional networks. The services by over 30 content-providers are now available for BeeLine GSM subscribers throughout the country. Due to the SPACE's open interfaces and parameter-driven configuration, all service extension activities were handled solely by operator.

SPACE (Service Provider Access Centre) is trademark of mnCPA Centre, a powerful scalable industry-level solution that is capable of handling up to a thousand messages per second. SPACE ensures one and the same financial, technical and legal connection scheme for all content-providers. The platform allows the operator to focus on its primary aims: transport and billing, receiving its revenue share from VAS provision in addition to traffic revenues.

SPACE has built-in load balancing tools between several platforms and external systems malfunction protection. The platform implements the interface between the operator and content-providers that provide VAS over SMS-, MMS-, WAP- and USSD-transports. This makes it independent of the communication standard (GSM, UMTS, CDMA). To connect to service-providers and integrate them with the operator's internal structure SPACE uses SMPP 3.4, SMTP, HTTP and XML protocols."

Posted to the site on 10th March 2004