Xius India allows Tata to roam

S Prasanna/Hyderabad

Tata Cellular, the cellular telephony service of Birla Tata AT&T in Andhra Pradesh recently announced the launch of a roaming facility on its prepaid card, Freedom. The service, branded Freedom Roam, allows pre-paid subscribers to stay connected in Tamil Nadu (except Chennai) and Kerala on their cellular phones while travelling outside Andhra Pradesh. The same would soon be extended to Chennai and Karnataka, said Subbaraman Iyer, vice-president, marketing, sales and customer service, Tata Cellular.

Claiming it to be the first inter-operator roam facility for pre-paid cards, Tata Cellular has launched the service in association with Xius India, a Satyam venture. Explaining the technology behind the service, G V Kumar, chief executive officer, Xius India, said it was an intrusive billing mechanism that has been developed using both telecommunications and switching technologies. “Traditionally, roam facility was provided only to post-paid subscribers of the cellular service as billing was done once a month, providing enough time for the operator to track the user location and complete the required transaction with the visited network before the billing was complete. But in pre-paid cards, the billing has to be real-time, meaning the balance amount in the subscriber’s card had to be deducted dynamically after every call,” says Kumar.

Xius has three main partners, i-Labs, U-Paid Systems of France and Zip Telecom and has acquired a digital, convergent payment processing system, ‘UPAID’ from U-Paid Systems, using which it offers completely convergent, real-time end-to-end pre-paid solutions encompassing pre-paid commerce and telephony.

Kumar said the billing system used the GSM technology to query the location of the mobile user. The result thus obtained is used as the criterion to determine the billing pattern home network or visited network.

The company first implemented its billing system for Reliance telecom in April 2000 and commercialised it in July 2000. The platform was implemented in Hexacom’s service in November 2000. The roam facility was implemented for BPL’s cellular service in August 2001. The roam facility introduced by Tata Cellular links with the networks of BPL for Kerala and Tamil Nadu, RPG for Chennai and Spice for Karnataka.

Kumar said Xius was currently conducting beta tests for its next generation platform, which it intends launching in April 2002. He said the platform was an intelligent network platform that would help telecommunication service operators offer integrated services to their subscribers.