Nokia Completes World's Largest Modernization of HLR Database in India for Vodafone

In many developing countries around the world there is not a system in place to accurately locate where the population resides. This complicates many of the services public and private organizations are looking to provide for citizens in these countries. The Home Location Register (HLR) is a database of permanent subscriber information for a mobile network, which is a fundamental element of CDMA, TDMA and GSM networks that contains address, account status, and preferences of the subscriber.

The completion of the largest HLR modernization in the world for Vodafone (News - Alert)'s SuperNet in India by Nokia is going to bring 200 million subscribers under one consolidated database. The process also lowered the number of database hosting nodes from 42 to 12, which will further improve the performance and efficiency of SuperNet while saving costs.

The sheer volume of this project was impressive, and according to Nokia (News - Alert), it was able to migrate the HLR database without disrupting Vodafone India's network and its 200 million subscribers. This was achieved with the Nokia Subscriber Data Management (SDM) solution, which features Nokia's One-NDS (News - Alert) (Network Directory Server).

Vishant Vora, Director - Technology, Vodafone India, said: "We believe we have executed the world's fastest and largest subscriber database migration without any network or services disruption. Further, our customers will benefit from faster, more efficient provisioning. The increase in network resiliency will help us recover quickly in case of natural disasters."

The Nokia SDM is based on an open standard that supports multiple applications third parties, operators and other vendors as well as Nokia to work with any standard industry domain and technology, including circuit core, packet core, EPC or LTE (News - Alert).  It has been designed specifically for telecom operators so they can have extremely high availability and reliability along with the fastest speed and highest performance. This type of availability gives operators access to the subscriber data in a single repository for a reliable, real-time view of each customer.

According to Nokia, being able to manage the data in this way significantly lowers the cost.  T-Mobile (News - Alert) Germany was able to lower its data management costs by 55 percent with this solution in place. To ensure the safety of the data, it is shared in real-time between three sites, and should any site run into a problem the full load is instantly and automatically shared between the remaining sites.

Sanjay Malik, market head of Nokia India, said: "As operators are focusing on making their networks more agile and subscriber-centric, we are providing our customers with solutions to deliver a superior experience. This program is the result of a strong and enduring relationship with Vodafone India in which we share their vision for enhancing the customer experience and improving efficiency."

This project has the potential to introduce a new system of service delivery not only for telecoms, but also for the government because they will now be able to have accurate information as to where their citizens reside. Even though this was not the initial goal of the project the  consolidation of network -related subscriber data into a single unified platform that can be shared across multiple applications can have unintended benefits.