Background
Maroc Telecom is the privatised incumbent operator in Morocco, now owned by Vivendi. The company wished to deploy an improved customer care system to handle calls from mobile subscribers. After an extensive procurement process they chose the Irisa call handling software from Datamedia, France, and local company, Synaptique Maghreb, as their system integrator. However, the Datamedia software was a SIP application server and Maroc Telecom's traffic was on a Siemens EWSD TDM switch. SS7 interconnect was considered necessary to maintain valuable signalling information like CLI.

A highly reliable and scalable signalling and media gateway was required to complete the solution.

WTL Solution
WTL were contacted by Synaptique Maghreb and asked to participate in a pilot project. The SoIP Gateway was proposed to make the bridge between Maroc Telecom's current network and the Irisa SIP-based Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. The first step was to carry out extensive interoperability tests between Datamedia and WTL to ensure the perfect SIP signalling exchange needed in this application, then the pilot project was implemented with the customer. A small SoIP Gateway was deployed in Maroc Telecom's test labs in Rabat for SS7 interconnect approval and overall testing of the proposed end-to-end system.
Following a rigorous six week test period, the solution was agreed to meet all Maroc Telecom's requirements, and so, in due course, a full, operational, system was ordered and installed by Synaptique.
Amine Rachdi, Managing Director of Synaptique said, "I was impressed by the commitment that WTL showed to this project. As an integrator, you need to feel that your vendors are fully supporting you". He also praised the user-friendliness of the WTL equipment, "The SoIP is so easy to manage that, after some brief initial training from WTL, my engineers were perfectly able to handle the pilot project. The SS7 interconnect was achieved very simply with nobody from WTL even needing to come to Morocco".

Resilience
Given that Maroc Telecom would be routing all their customer care calls via this system, reliability and the ability to survive faults were critical. The network designed for Maroc Telecom was fully resilient with 2 x 8 E1s SoIPs (the SoIP SS7 to IP gateway is scalable from 1 to 32 E1s with matching numbers of SIP calls).

An important consideration for Maroc was high availability. On the network side this was achieved using WTL's highly effective DMTP3 fail-safe signalling. This allows the two links of an SS7 signalling linkset to be on two physically separate WTL platforms. Should one signalling link or switch fail, the other SoIP detects this and takes over the signalling duties.

On the SIP side, load sharing was implemented so that the traffic was spread over twin Irisa voice response platforms.

WTL's Managing Director, Leigh Smith, observed, "I think the project is an interesting one – it shows that customers are picking the best of breed voice applications (in this case the Irisa voice response system) regardless of the underlying communications protocols, and turning to us to link it to their network. We are going to see much more of this hybridisation in the next 2 or 3 years."

Next Steps
The first 6 months of operation since implementation have shown that the network design has worked perfectly, and there has been no downtime or interruption to service. As a result, the capacity of the system has already been increased by 50%. It is also planned to roll out the system to handle more of Maroc telecom's subscriber enquiries.

SoIP Gateway
WTL's SoIP offers an easy to use, cost effective, way of connecting VoIP-based traffic to SS7 networks.  

•     1 to 16 Signalling Link Pairs

•     1 to 32 E1 trunks

•     SIP and H323

•     30 to 960 VoIP calls

 The product is based on the field-proven WTL signalling software installed on more than 100 operators, and includes support for many country / carrier variants.

Applications include:

• Creating small SS7 PoPs

• Linking legacy networks to VoIP carriers

• SS7 tunnelling through a VoIP network

• Central signalling with distributed trunks

• Connecting Next-Gen Application  Servers to TDM networks

About Synaptique Maghreb
Synaptique Maghreb is one of the leading systems integrators in North Africa, with many successful projects delivered. The company specialises in convergence, bringing together expertise in fixed, mobile, 'traditional' and VoIP telecom technologies. Synaptique has represented Datamedia in Morocco for 3 years.
For more information about Synaptique please visit www.wtl.be or email sales@wtl.be 

About WTL
World Telecom Labs is a Belgium-based company which has long been a leader in the provision of VoIP switches, Pre-Paid applications and signalling gateways for emerging carriers and telecom service operators. WTL has an installed base of 100,000s of voice ports with service providers worldwide switching billions of minutes of VoIP traffic using WTL equipment. For more information about WTL and its products, please visit www.wtl.be or email sales@wtl.be