Middle East & North Africa Telecommunications

Qatar will host the high profile 15th Asian Games in December 2006 and the event is expected to produce increased messaging traffic, a pattern regularly seen during major sporting events such as the FIFA World Cup and Olympic Games. The Games, coupled with the upcoming Eid holiday, make it essential that Qtel has the necessary infrastructure to offer a seamless and robust messaging service.

LogicaCMG’s SMSC platform is providing Qtel with the necessary stable and robust messaging infrastructure, in addition to engineering expertise onsite and round-the-clock technical support. Qtel has also selected LogicaCMG’s Central Management System (CMS) which provides a real time view of SMS traffic, faults and operational efficiencies. CMS is one element of an integrated set of central components, an approach that is unique to LogicaCMG, which are all reusable across multiple messaging engines and form an integral part of LogicaCMG’s Next Generation Messaging solution. The implementation of LogicaCMG’s payments engine, the Pre-Delivery Service Agent (PSA), will also enable Qtel to offer customers pre-paid SMS roaming.

Qtel executive director for wireless services, Sheikh Fahad Bin Jassim Al Thani, commented:

‘The Asian Games is an incredible opportunity for Qatar to showcase its sporting infrastructure to the world and we wanted to ensure our mobile messaging service would be something to be equally proud of. LogicaCMG has an excellent reputation in the Middle East and are the leading messaging specialists globally. Therefore we naturally wanted to work with a company with proven expertise in delivering robust platforms which can cope with heavy traffic.’

Nabil Y. Khalil, director, telecoms at LogicaCMG in the Middle East and North Africa added: ‘Qatar is seeing unprecedented growth from both an increasing population and the accompanying infrastructure development, and Qtel recognised that their mobile infrastructure needed to be upgraded to accommodate a rapidly increasing subscriber base. With two out of every three SMSs sent globally processed by LogicaCMG systems, we have the experience and support capability to meet Qtel’s requirements both today and in the future.’