Estel Group, the Rs 20 crore company providing high technology back office solutions and services to telecom carriers, has chalked out an aggressive strategy for the next one year with greater emphasis on its billing solutions and services (mainly inter carrier billing & settlements). Though the past one year has not been good in terms of sales of billing solutions, Estel plans to make its mark through this service.

The company also recently launched ‘clearing house services’ in partnership with Hansen Technologies of Australia, one of the world’s largest providers of billing solutions and also a major operator of billing bureau services worldwide.

Estel presently provides solutions and services through Estel Telecom (that caters to cellular and fixed line telecom carriers for prepaid telephony like prepaid mobile, calling and SIM cards, billing & SMS services and related STK applications,) and Estel Communication (the largest wholesale providers of International IP services in India). Estel Communication also offers mission critical Internet backbone services to ISPs and IPVPN services to software companies & corporations on this network. (More than 50 per cent of India’s ISPs use Estel’s network to connect to the global Internet.)

According to Raj Hajela, managing director, Estel Telecom, “With the continuing deregulation of telecom in India, local access carriers can now directly interconnect to other access providers in the same circle. The new TRAI Interconnect Policy provides a share of revenue to all three networks— originating, transit and terminating. This opens up a plethora of opportunity for all the carriers in India. In order to capitalise on this opportunity, carriers need to have the capability to accurately bill inbound calls, verify interconnect bills from other carriers, and to provide detailed drill down reports and MIS for settlement, reconciliation and dispute resolution. And this is where we plan to use our expertise as an outsourced interconnect billing service provider to telecom carriers (constituting mobile, fixed, circuit switched and IP).”

The main features of this service are—charges based on usage (thus eliminating the need for purchase and maintenance of own platforms), high security of data, elimination of technology obsolescence risk on hardware and software and migration path available to the customer’s stand-alone inter carrier billing platform.

To take its plans further, the company would be opening up ‘billing bureaus’ that will help Estel tap the potential arising due to the immense opportunity arising in the first and second tier of ISPs. Describing the opportunity, Hajela says that presently there are no billing bureaus in India since the number of service providers does not justify the need for the bureaus. But, with the opening up of the market and more work coming in, the top carriers will get immense opportunity that needs to be passed on. And this is where the bureaus will come in, as the Tier 1 service provider will outsource their work to resellers (who would need billing solutions and services).