NUST Business School

Nayatel: Increasing efficiency from access to customer premises

Management Information Systems

MBA 2k18
Section A

Group Members:
Sumaira Riaz
Hafsa Arshad
Sujda Shah
Saqib Chaudhary
Abdullah Irshad

Submitted to: Dr. Fareesa Malik

December 9, 2018
Nayatel: Increasing efficiency from access to customer premises

Abstract:
This case focus on service optimization of a technical device used to configure telecom and data
services for customers on technical end. Nayatel became the first company in Pakistan
providing DSL services in 2002 and first ever company for deploying fiber to the home
infrastructure in 2006. The case revolves around need for service efficiency, identifying gaps
which results in developing a module in their existing ERP solution; facilitating employees in
successful delivery of their daily operations. After successful development of the module, how
it was being deployed and utilized to achieve companies vision of expansion in other cities. In
addition, the coordination between different teams, their working methodology and aim to
optimize the resources has been addressed.

Company Background:
Nayatel (NTL) is Pakistan’s one of the fastest growing networks providing a premium triple play
(Internet, Cable TV, Phone) service. High Speed FTTH (fiber to the home) internet infrastructure
has transformed Islamabad into one of the most connected and optically wired cities of the
world and Nayatel itself has become South Asia’s fifth company in deploying state of the art
fiber network system.
Nayatel purely focuses on quality and customer service, in fact it has re-written the quality of
service parameters in Pakistani context. Nayatel has been a trend setter in broadband, setting
new quality standards totally aligned with customers’ expectations and requirements. Fair and
ethical business is hallmark of their corporate strategy.
These combinations of quality and service make NTL as most trusted and reliable telecom
service provider of twin cities. NTL’s team has a passion to make Pakistan a prosperous nation
using modern IT enabled and cutting-edge technology as tool for development. In recent years
NTL has expanded its operations in Peshawar and Faisalabad, aiming to expand in other major
cities of Pakistan in the coming few years.
With increasing customers NTL has been pushing boundaries to meet with the customer
satisfaction levels and providing quality service efficiently.

Exhibit 1: (Nayatel achievement’s roadmap)

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Nayatel: Increasing efficiency from access to customer premises

Nayatel Architecture:
Nayatel telecom service provider has a three-layered architecture of network (Gateway, core
and access) as shown by exhibit 2.
Exhibit 2: (Network Architecture)

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Nayatel: Increasing efficiency from access to customer premises

Gateway layer from the network connect uplinks to the backbone service provider which are
Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE) and Transworld Associates (TWA). PIE is further connected to
the SEA-ME-WE 4 (South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4) is an optical fiber
submarine communications cable system that carries telecommunications between Singapore,
Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia,
Sudan, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France. The cable is approximately 18,800 kilometers
long, and provides the primary Internet backbone between South East Asia, the Indian
subcontinent, the Middle East and Europe.
Exhibit 3: (SEA-ME-WE 4 specifications and route information)

Core layer which is for internal network reachability consists of routers and servers to redirect
the traffic generated form voice, video and data. Aggregation layer which serves a purpose for
OLTs uplink terminations. Access layer consisting of OLTs and ONTs on which customers are
configured. Physical layer consisting of complex distribution of fiber network across cities.

Exhibit 4: (shows a network architecture consisting of gateway, core and access layers)

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Nayatel: Increasing efficiency from access to customer premises

Nayatel Fiber to the home (FTTH):

Nayatel FTTH system, can be divided into three main categories of customer premises, outside
access and core head office. The customer premises consist of smart devices like ONT, optical
fiber cables whereas the core head office consists of core routers, IP servers, distribution
splitters. The outside access has a huge infrastructure of optical fibers connected with OLT’s at
a sector/region level called POP (point of presence). Each POP serves a specific area and has a
limited customer slots available.
Exhibit 5: (FTTH network of a POP)

OLT:
OLT (An optical line terminal, is a device which serves as the service provider endpoint of a
passive optical network), located at the provider's central office, transmits data to users at 1310
nanometers (nm). The signal passes through splitters and can serve up to 128 customers at a
range of approximately 20 kilometers, or 12.5 miles. A single OLT can serve thousands of
customers and can be centralized in a campus/region environment. An OLT needs to be
configured with specific customer profile of services in order to provide a service.
Exhibit 6: (A standard OLT of FTTH systems)

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Nayatel: Increasing efficiency from access to customer premises

Nayatel ERP solution:

NTL has state of the art ERP solution which has been developed in house to facilitate the
employees in their day to day activities. Apart from providing customer support through CRM
and billing details, the NTL system has a web interface to configure customer services on OLT,
checking status of services, identifying faults and downtimes. The OLT cannot be configured
without adding user service profiles on to the CRM system.

Exhibit 7: (CRM module for manual OLT installation)

Nayatel Working Mechanism:

From acquiring of customers via sales team to successfully making its customers, NTL have
multiple qualified departments for making things happen. First customer requirements are
analyzed, then a suitable package is suggested, in certain cases customized packages are
designed too. Broadly classifying NTL provide 2 main packages, one for residential customers
and the other for corporate customers. After the package has been finalized and payment
made, an initial survey team of engineers visit the customer premises and design a layout for
installation. After which the installation team while completing all the pre-requisites installs the
service for customer.
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Nayatel: Increasing efficiency from access to customer premises

Exhibit 8: (NTL packages for residential customers)

Triple play services Installation:

Over the past few years, one of the best packages NTL has made for mass marketing is their
Triple play services Video/Voice/Data including cable TV, Telephone service and internet.
NTL triple play has been a hit over masses and 40% of their revenue comes from these
residential services. The installation process begins with customer registration for the service,
then area specific installation team visits the premises and identifies the specific OLT that can
serve that customer. OLT consists of 14-line cards, 2 PON ports per card and 128 customers per
PON port. In total a single OLT can support up to 4000 customers.
Suppose the OLT ABC is serving a customer in F-10/4, street 32, house 4. The engineer will look
for open slots in ABC OLT. Let’s say he identifies that ABC OLT has a free slot on 12th line card,
port 2 and slot number 38. He will configure ABC-12-2-38.
Each remote team engineer has GUI access to all the OLTs through their CRM. After identifying
the free slot and getting details of required services, a service profile is generated. The service
profile is then added to the CRM, which makes service ports. So in order for triple play services,
3 service ports are created on CRM. An integral step of making service port is adding ONT serial

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Nayatel: Increasing efficiency from access to customer premises

number which is not issued until the ports are created. So the configuration engineer puts a
dummy serial number in order to generate the ports.
It takes 30-35 minutes for the configuration through their existing CRM interface. The
transmission engineers issue an ONT from inventory, visits customer premises to install the
ONT and then to OLT to put the service port into active state. At the OLT, transmission engineer
calls the configuration engineer to replace the dummy serial number with the correct serial
number of ONT. After it is updated, the customer can start using the services required.

Exhibit 9: (GUI for OLT line cards)

Efficiency of the configuration model:

Nayatel striving to deliver the best possible customer service faced certain limitations with their
OLT. The current OLT of Alcatel-Lucent (a French global telecommunications equipment
company) had no feature to support complex automations, CLI access was not provided and
they had to stick with the GUI interface, as CLI is fast and commands can run in seconds.
Nayatel have goals of spreading their networks in other cities of Pakistan but first they need to
make changes in their current infrastructure. Nayatel with their growing customer base are
making on average 1,000 installations per month.

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Nayatel: Increasing efficiency from access to customer premises

The current OLT’s faced a dilemma of installation, Asst. Manager, technical services explain the
situation:
”It took an engineer 30 – 35 minutes per customer installation of the service lacking the
efficiency, furthermore to investigate the issue of any customer facing downtime a team of
engineers were sent to that area’s OLT to manually run the programs and identify the issue
which were then transferred to the head office, thus wasting a lot of time and resources per
customer.”
Exhibit 10: (Configuration time estimation)

Installations/month 1,000
Installations/day 38
Time spent/installation 35 minutes
Time spent/day 22 hours

So, the whole configuration department spent 22 hours on configuration of new services only,
putting a lot of work load on the team and providing less support for other process.

Exhibit 11: (Manual configuration errors)

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Nayatel: Increasing efficiency from access to customer premises

Resolution:
Nayatel have an inhouse ERP solution, having capabilities of modifications and customization.
The team of managers were given the responsibility to come with the solution for OLT to have
better user experience and in-house efficiency.
Nayatel had to come up with a solution of optimizing resources quickly to facilitate their
expansion in other cities of Pakistan and still having a competitive edge over other networks
such as PTCL; a giant telco having good infrastructure in Pakistan.

Proposed Solution:
The team of managers identified the most common type of installations that were being done
on daily basis. More than 50% of installations were for residential customers requesting triple
play services. The procedure of installation which was loading profile and creating ports on the
server can be done by automation. The Asst. Manager quoted:

“These technical modules development is not very formal here, if some department has a
solution, it is taken up to all managers in a meeting. Different aspects are being discussed and if
all agree it is put forward to the CO. The benefit of having an inhouse enterprise department is,
it gets easier to explain the mechanism and get the desired output.”

Furthermore, to support this automation, Huawei OLT’s were proposed due to their advance
technology, capability of customizations, multiple access methods, and value for money.
Initially the upgrade of OLT’s started from Alcatel to Huawei gradually. The in-house ERP
development team created a module in their CRM for automation of service. Now the
configuration and transmission engineer both had access to the module.
Now if a customer X has registered for triple play service in G-11/1, the transmission engineer
will identify which POP is serving customer X. Once POP is identified, the respected OLT will be
looked for free slots, for example ABC OLT has free slot 21 on line 17 and PON port 2.
The transmission engineer will initiate the process by loading the profile for ABC-17-2-21 by
placing the dummy serial number and clicking on ‘initiate process’
The server will automatically create the service ports for ABC-17-2-21 within next 15 mins.
Installation will be completed. The transmission engineer will issue the ONT, goes to the OLT,
insert the card and send a text message of the ONT number. The configuration engineer with
login to the CLI interface and replace the dummy number with correct ONT serial number.

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Nayatel: Increasing efficiency from access to customer premises

Services will be enabled for the customer with next 5 minutes thus cutting the whole time of
installation to 15-20 minutes instead of 30-35 minutes previously.
Now the configuration department can utilize the time efficiently in resolving issues and
configuring corporate clients which are generating 50% of their total revenue.
The whole process took in house developers their time and resources for months but at the end
automating the whole installation process has resulted them in utilizing their resources in an
efficient manner and doing more installations per day resulting in 7-10 days of service
installation which was previously communicated ad 10 – 14 days.

Exhibit 12: (Automated module of CRM for OLT configuration)

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Nayatel: Increasing efficiency from access to customer premises

Exhibit 13: (Advanced CLI for OLT error rectification)

Conclusion:
With increasing customer database, requirement for increased services, high speed data
bundles and keeping up with customer satisfaction, NTL must decide quickly whether to
upgrade their existing Alcatel OLT’s with Huawei OLT’s which require heavy investment and
upgrading their CRM module which has already been developed for new OLT’s or to stick with
their previous installation process resulting in inefficient use of their resources.
The Asst. Manager commented on the optimization of the installation process:

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Nayatel: Increasing efficiency from access to customer premises

“Previously it took us 35 minutes on average for a single installation, now our engineers are
doing it in less time, making room for other work and we are able to shift our resources for
better utilization”
Nayatel should consider their success of system optimization and let their ERP solution become
a differentiated element for their future growth.

Acknowledgement:
We would like to thank Sheikh Hammad Ahmed (Asst. Manager), Nayatel for his continuous
support and without whom this case would not have been written.

References:
1. Package details and vision of the company:
https://nayatel.com/
2. Transcripts and recordings:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1VAtEXyZ0wWc921lSPPL4OYk0cnbC8GjL

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