German Village Sulaimaniya

Dated : 25th Sep 2011

Well its been about 2 months since I have landed here. So thought about sharing my experience for those of you who might be toying with the idea of coming to this place  for $$$$. I work for a large Telco .i.e. Asiacell Iraq. I arrived here with my wife and an 18 months baby girl in August 2011. I am living in a relatively upscale neighbourhood with company provided accomodation in a very nice compound with decent and well educated neighbors.  Recently I rented out a car , a simple Nissan Sunny Classic at  450 USD per month. This was just to give you my point of view for the discussion below and was not to flaunt anything that I have.

Sulemaniya or conveniently called as Suly is a city in northern Iraq not very far away from Iran border.  Most people arrive in Suly via Dubai through a budget airline flydubai which takes off from Dubai’s Terminal 2.  Airport in suly is a slighlty improved version of a bus terminal. However it is expected to improve soon (just overheard that ).   The first thing I noticed about Suly is the warmth and friendly nature of its people. People here are mostly nice, they are  willing to lend you a hand and love to chat with you.  City itself is small, quite peaceful with occasional protests off an on but nothing big. I came here in August and till now the climate is pleasant with extremely nice and cool breeze in the evenings. Based on my friends accounts,  May-July is considered extremely hot (like sun burnt hot) and Nov-Mar is extremely cold (like piercing cold).

The city is far from the  typical depiction  of dusty, war-ravaged and hostile Iraqi city. This city may be part of the Iraq but it has absorbed the culture of other countries, amongst them Turkey especially, because of the large kurdish diaspora overseas which has recently begun to move back. People are prosperus and style concious. Most of the women dress here in stylish western attire, though others slightly conservative ones are not that un common as well. Religion and religious extremisim is not for this city and as I can gauge from the situation must be highly discouraged from the government as well. Bars, discos and massage parlors can also be easily found, if you are looking for them.

The city infrastructure (incl roads, schools, bridges) is fairly good and is fast improving. Electricity needs of the city is mostly met by diesel generators. If you are working for a good company who has arranged for you a decent accomodation then  you should never face power and water shortage. There are very good housing communities (appartment blocks in a gated compound) in the city and more development is in progress.

You can easily rent a care here (Its left hand drive like USA) and can roam around the city without any issue. I even go out in night with no problem. There is an old style bazaar in the middle of the city and it serves your every need. There are also small and medium sized shopping malls serving most of your needs in the city. There are couple of good cinemas here showing latest hollywood movies so this is one thing you can do. In short one can live a normal and comfortable life here like any other place in the world.

Now the downside….

1. Not many people can converse in english so you may have to learn a bit of kurdi to explain numbers and quantiity .etc.
2. Hospitals are good for small /routine issues but for complications it is said to best avoid the hospital here. People here mostly utilize medical resources in Jordan, Dubai or India for complicated matters.
3. Not many options for clothings are available, so if you are planning to come here bring lots of dresses/suits along.
4. I am trying to find a day-care for my baby, unable to find it so far.
5. If you love food then this is not the place to be especially for the Pakistani/Indian style food. There are no KFC, Mcdonald or for that matter any international food chains here. I could not find decent Pakistani/Indian spices (masala), yes there are some low quality ones available here.
6. Not many choices except Nido is available for baby formula milk. So my baby is sticking with Nido and putting on unwanted weight .
7. Basic items like food and clothes are really expensive which are available some times twice/thrice the Dubai price. So if you are negotiating for salary, negotiate well.
8. You can not own a car here, however you can buy a car in the name of trust worthy Kurdi. There are no insurance options available here so if your merc hits a curb then your iraqi dream is down the kurdish drain.
9. There are few banks here but people do not trust the bank. Expats like us repatriate our dollars to foreign currency accounts back home.

Ok guys gotta get back to work, will share more latter. If you have any questions about Iraq especially Sulemaniya, please write to me at aatifjamal@hotmail.com

1. Products and Appendant products ( simply speaking, a subscriber can have a main package and then sub packages in layers.)
2. Global Products (Packages that are applicable to complete subscriber base)
3. Accumulators (These are counters which will record subscriber activity and are used to offer loyalty or usage based promotions to subscribers)
4. Subscriber attributes ( Attributes like subscriber’s birthday, gender, profession , last activity date, last recharge date .etc. can be used as a criteria for promotions and tariff)
5. Due to planned aggressive micro segmentation strategy, each subscriber can have a unique product set based on above four criteria.

Above mentioned new OCS concepts, raises many questions from business point of view. Some of these are…

1. How will revenue be reported? Impact on MIS  and Reporting Functions!
2. How will revenue be assured? Impact on Revenue assurance system!
3. How will customer data be managed on CRM? Impact on CRM system!
4. How will contact center agent handle the customer complaints? Impact on CRM system!
5. How will such a wide array of products be promoted? Impact on CRM system!
6. How will sanity of numerous OCS based promotions will be verified. Impact on Revenue assurance, MIS, CRM, Fraud Management systems
7. How will subscriber be entering his personal information in OCS? Impact on CRM
8. What will happen if subscriber changes his MSISDN, will we refresh his accumulators or will these accumulators be transferred to his new account à Impact on CARES

 All these questions and many more demand a complete re-think and review of business process framework to meet the challenges of OCS in BSS domain. It is imperative to evolve IT systems and OCS in tandem to maximize and harness OCS benefits.

 These issues must be discussed at length with IT and marketing teams, the best way forward in my humble opinion is to gather requirements in the form of new business rules in following domains

1. Revenue assurance
2. Customer Data Management
3. Fraud management
4. Complaints management

 IT team should be requested to take the lead in this specialized domain and compile new set of business rules (if required) from end users such as Finance, Cops and marketing. These business rules will be translated into technical requirements which can impact OCS CDR/ DB logs formats and CRM interfaces.

In my own opinion, engineers present in the Technical department are never really aware of the impact of their every day activities, tasks and decisions on over all “balance sheet”. As soon as an engineer is inducted into a technical department he is moulded by the environment into someone who is good in following processes, learning technical knowledge of systems  and executing them by the book. He is evaluated and appraised on the basis of criteria which judge him as  a good engineer instead of evaluating the monetary benefits brought about by him for the company. On the contrary,  rest of the employees belonging to Marketing, Admin and S&D departments have Revenue target, Cost Targets and sales targets respectively.

Therefore I suggest that some of the engineers (if not all)in Service provider’s ‘Technical operations department’ needs to have awareness and to some extent responsibility of revenue targets.  The targets for these engineers can be called as “Enrichment Targets”. For example group of engineers in Operations department can have 5% revenue enrichment target for a fiscal year. This target will push these engineers to

• Proactively identify revenue leakages
• Proactively identify and resolve hidden problems
• Suggest solutions to reduce cost and time to market a service and product.

The group of these engineers can become an asset to your marketing/sales department and they can always look towards these engineers to provide extra impetus in order to achieve revenue targets.

Aatif Jamal (2010) from his book Gulha-e-Chawal

1. Low-cost delivery of legacy services like voice, SMS and MMS

2. Fixed Mobile Convergence like VCC

3. Web Integration with services like Facebook, EBay, MSN Messenger, yahoo etc

Although the need for these objectives is well understood, however it is difficult and some times impractical to realize these objectives from Technical and commercial point of view.

 1. Low Cost Delivery of Legacy Services

 Migration of legacy services like Voice, SMS and MMS in order to gain Capex/Opex savings is the biggest farce because it is not difficult to establish connectivity with current MSC, SMSC and MMSC systems. Furthermore existing interfaces are standard and widely adopted by applications and content providers all over the world. Migration of these legacy services is only going to increase the cost of their delivery.

2. Fixed Mobile Convergence like VCC

Saying that the IMS provides fixed mobile convergence is calling aspirin the cure for all diseases. IMS is just a smaller piece of complete FMC puzzle. FMC is an all encompassing concept which entails convergence of services, convergence of devices and convergence of use experience. IMS only provides convergence of ‘subset’ of services and that is voice. Couple of IMS based FMC services like VCC have failed as they are perceived to be complicated from user experience point of view. Unavailability of handsets for VCC services is another factor.

3. Web Integration with services like Facebook, EBay, MSN Messenger, yahoo etc

It’s about time that operators realize that they are nothing more than the bit pipe. All those discussions in 3 GSM conferences to evolve themselves from the current bit pipe status have fizzled out. They just can’t have better social networks then Facebook, can’t have better messengers than MSN and GTalk and simply can’t outsmart apples and googles in app stores. Therefore enough with Web 2.0 and Telco 2.0 crap, at-least for GSM/EGDE operators.

humain tum maaf ker dou, humain kuch aisa chaska lag chuka tha
tumharee offeron ko behisi inkaar kernay ka
yeh hum bhool bethay that k re’ cession bhi aana hay
jo ab hum ceevian phaikain google per aur yahoo per
tumharay daftron say auto-reply ilawa, kuch na aaey ga

(Aatifiat: Nov 2009 taken from his book gulha-e-chawal)

Part 1: Introduction of SDP (Service Delivery Platform) layer

 Presence of myriads of VAS silos have presented us with two challenges.

1.  Vendor Management
2. interoperability of services. SDP is the the clarion call. 

Presence of lots of these small time VAS suppliers who are not as financially sound pose a considerable threat to continuity of service which needs to be eliminated as soon as possible. You pay again and again to VAS suppliers for development and modification of re-cyclable components like Hardware, CAMEL,SS7 stack, SMPP, ISUP and IOT .etc. Concept of strategic partnership can not be applied on these suppliers as their stakes are not high in your business. Delay a Acceptance certificate by few days and they put a stop to your project as they do not have financial elasticity to absorb such a delay.  3rd party HW and software which is part of their offering are not supported well and usually a grey area. Furthermore you can not make your one service work with another easily because of interoperability issues.

SDP on the other hand resolves all of the above mentioned  issues but pose another threat. You loose flexibility. Your SDP vendors got to have strong developer community which can fulfill your VAS needs.

These days there are two kinds of SDP suppliers 1) IT Companies like IBM or oracle 2) Telecom companies like NSN, Ericsson or Huawei. Though telecom companies are expert in resolving low level interfacing issues related to SS7, call connectivity .etc.  however they usually do not have strong developer communities which likes of HP or IBM would have. Therefore my recommendation is to go with IT suppliers like HP or IBM as network connectivity (SS7, CAMELL, IN , Billing interfaces) will be a one time job.

This is they way to go if operators want CAPEX and OPEX savings on Hardware, Software, IOT, floorspace, and power costs. Not only this the availability of SDP will improve Time to market and reduce O&M cost (you will need fewer engineers to maintain the SDP as compared to teams or a member assigned to VAS silos).

Part 2: Security bundle

In countries like Pakistan where our subscribers are pre-occupied by security concerns to him or his family, it is pertinent to introduce the “Security package” or “Security bundle”. Following could be the features of such a package.

1. All the members of family parents/children/spouses can be bundled in a group. We can call it “family group”.
2. Head of the family(HOF) .e.g. Father can  query the location of other family members. (LBS functionality)
3. HOF should be able enforce whitelists and black lists on his children so that his children can originate and recieve calls/sms to only those known to HOF. (IN + SMS Antispam  functionality)
4. Family prepaid account for all the family member can be used for security bundles, so that the HoF has control over family spendings.
5. Each family member must be able to send SOS calls and  SMS to HOF (including current location) with a single Key press. (USSD gateway + LBS  funtionality)
6. Each family member must be able to send SMS to all his family members using single shortcode. (Antispam functionality)

Operators need to project themselves as a family friendly network . Our customer needs to know that in case of family emergency our network will be there to help you.

**It is assumed that Antispam solution contains advanced messaging features like whitelist, black list, distribution list .etc.

In this case if a call is dialled to X by another subscriber of operator A, the call will be treated as ported out call (based on information received from NPDB-A) and call is routed to operator B. Operator B upon querying its NPDB -B route the call back to operator A. However operator A upon querying its NPDB will route the call again to operator B and so on, cauing a continous loop. This loop may cause the fluctuation or complete outage in signallling links, therefore  a solution needs to be in place to avoid this situation.

In order to avoid this loop condition, a mechanism to detect this loop needs to be implemented on GMSC in the form of software patch. This solution will consist of following logic.

1. Operator-A recieves the IAM on interconnect links at its GMSC.
2. GMSC-A will now append operator’s own RN(MNP Routing Number) in the called party number .e.g. if RN of operator A is D0355 then GMSC-A will convert the called number from 03335100068 to D03553335100068 .
3. GMSC-A will send an SRI of 0333 5100068(original called number) to NPDB.
4. NPDB will send SRI-Resp back to GMSC. if the number is ported out then the RN of other operator will be returned in the MSRN field of SRI_resp message.
5. GMSC will compare the modified called number (generated by appending operator’s own RN in called number as in step 2) with the MSRN field. If the numbers are same then the call will be processed further. If numbers are different call will be dropped immediately in order to avoid loop.