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Bridging The Digital Divide: A Comprehensive Multi-Service Platform Helps SAWTEL
Serve Emerging World Markets and Formerly Unreachable Regions
The Customer
SAWTEL's leading-edge satellite/wireless communications network gives businesses and consumers in emerging markets around the world affordable new access to premium, feature-rich voice and data services. Its broad array of services are now used by subscribers across the Caribbean, the Middle East, West Africa, Southeast Asia and around the world.
The Challenge
The 'digital divide' that now separates established and emerging markets has many root causes, one of the biggest of which is the lack of connectivity. The enormous overhead associated with standard landline and cellular network deployments makes telecom service costs in these under-developed markets disproportionately high, and in some markets prevents even baseline service deployment. As a result, inordinately high costs restrict the use of voice and data services among established businesses, and leave credit-challenged consumers and smaller businesses either underserved or completely unserved.
To break through this digital divide, SAWTEL is deploying an innovative Wi-Fi/satellite network architecture that lets it deliver telecom services with unprecedented affordability, simplicity and access. But to realize the full potential of its 'iron light' architecture, the SAWTEL team had to find a powerful, comprehensive VoIP service application solution that would meet several stringent and demanding criteria. The solution had to support multiple services economically and with minimal Cap-EX, scale readily, and provide the foundation for the unusual breadth of services and subscriber feature innovations SAWTEL needed to serve diverse business and consumer needs. Among these requirements were:
- State-of-the-art VoBB/IP PBX services and features to help SAWTEL capture market share among established
businesses and serve new ones;
- Advanced, integrated prepaid capabilities to support consumers whose income levels and credit histories forced
them to forgo services;
- An innovation-friendly architecture that enables rapid creation and deployment of new features, and helps SAWTEL
future-proof is services against eventual competition;
- Global deployment capabilities, from multi-language IVR and currency conversions, least-cost routing and operator assistance;
- The scalability to support SAWTEL's aggressive growth ; and
- Transport-agnostic reliability that lets SAWTEL leverage its converged network.
The Solution
After carefully evaluating leading voice service applications and developer tools, SAWTEL chose the complete Pactolus Multi-Service Platform, including the RapidFLEX Service Creation Environment (SCE) and RapidFLEX Service Delivery Platform
(SDP), as well as the highly customizable turnkey suite of Pactolus SIPware VoIP service applications: VoBB, Conferencing, Prepaid, Messaging and Operator Assistance.
"The numerous challenges our business model presented, coupled with the realities of satellite to ground hand-offs, meant
that our voice services solution had to offer market-proven reliability, and the ability to create and customize feature sets to accommodate new usage modes. It also had to meet an unusual but critically-important criterion: the ability to reliably extend across new networks," notes Sawtel Inc.'s Chief Technology Officer, Eric Koffie-Asare.
"Pactolus' SIPware suite and powerful RapidFLEX platform proved to be the only voice service suite solution that could
ensure toll-quality voice services, support multiple services on a single platform, and deliver the reliability and service breadth essential to serve our targeted business and consumer populations."
The Integration
The Pactolus Multi-Service Suite is tightly integrated with SAWTEL's core facilities and key network elements, including its NexTone session border controller, Seimens High Path Media Gateways and Cisco gateways. SAWTEL is also deploying Pactolus session border controllers on its access side for SIP peering to other carriers and SIP terminations.
The Results
SAWTEL now provides businesses and consumers around the world with a rich array of services: Internet access, extranet applications, messaging services, V-LAN applications, hosting services, multicasting and video, and of course, premium toll-quality voice over IP with advanced subscriber features.
SAWTEL is also creating and incorporating new features that best serve their target markets, such as its innovative dial-back cellular conferencing that provides extremely economical long distance conference call origination via cell phones. It enables economical conference calling, which is otherwise cost-prohibitive in many emerging markets.
SAWTEL is successfully breaking through the digital divide with its unique transport/access network architecture and the
award-winning Pactolus Multi-Service Platform and Service Suite.
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