MTNL started with providing broadband services to its customers over DSL and later, put in a MPLS based core network in place to cater to the increasing data traffic requirements. MTNL further wanted to expand its DSL capacity and envisioned a consolidation of its OSS/BSS/IT systems for the complete data network. There were a lot of disparate systems in a stand-alone mode and the network infrastructure was disparate and heterogeneous with equipments from many vendors such as Ericsson, Juiper, 3Com, Huawei and Alcatel.

They wanted to automate their broadband network completely and consolidate its network management. This entailed setting up a data centre and NOC where all the IT/OSS/BSS applications could be hosted and connecting these applications to the network elements and devices. In the process of consolidating billing and customer care for all its services into a single platform, MTNL also envisaged the integration of the IT/OSS/BSS systems with the Convergent Billing and Customer Care System.

Spanco offered a COTS application based approach. It made sure that the customization needs were kept to a minimum and most features were delivered out-of-the-box, hence simplifying the maintaining of the deployment. One of the biggest challenges was the cost at which the solution was to be delivered, implying that the best possible applications had to be offered at the most competitive price.

The Solution was implemented by using products such as Provisioning and Inventory Management from Oracle, Performance and Fault Monitoring from IBM, Device Management from Motive, Billing and AAA from Elitecore and LI from NICE. The solution was deployed on UNIX based hardware platforms from IBM and SUN and Storage Systems from IBM..