How Telecom OSS Evolved

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Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 Subscribe To Our Feed

Telecom service providers have gone through several innovations and service adaptations. From the ability to connect people over telephones to digitization of networks, to the recent big pipe phenomenon, it has been a long and tough journey. The latest challenge facing these operators is providing service to their customers with a greater degree of flexibility and agility. This is where telecom OSS solutions come into picture.

Operational Support Systems, or OSS as they are called for short, are not necessary for the service to work, but are critical to ensure that service can be delivered, is delivered, and will continue to be delivered. They are the support systems that make the service delivery happen. Over the years, the telecom operators have expanded their operations into many domains and that has led to a lot of network built up. Keeping track of and managing these networks is where OSS solutions help.

There are many kinds of Telecom OSS solutions available in the market. The most common and probably the oldest solutions are the Element Management Systems (EMS) and the Network Management Systems (NMS). These systems perform the same function but at different scales. Typically, all the equipment in the network is called network elements and the OSS system managing them is the EMS. If the network is heterogeneous, i.e., consisting of products from multiple vendors and using different technologies, the OSS system managing it becomes an NMS.

The NMS/EMS solutions provide several management functions that are vital for any ISP. These range from configuration solutions to alarm reporting and other control features. What these NMS/EMS systems have done is that they have allowed ISPs to start monitoring and troubleshooting the network problems remotely from a central location rather than from field. This gives a lot of cost savings and reduced troubleshooting cycles.

Over the years, as the ISP requirements grew, the OSS systems evolved. Today, it is not just EMS/ NMS, but it also encompasses Customer Management Systems, Business Management Systems, Inventory Management Systems, etc. These evolutions help ISP tackle different pain areas of rapidly growing network operations to meet customer demands better.

Inventory management is probably the most important addition to OSS functions in recent times. With lot of planning and upgrading going on, keeping track of inventory is absolutely essential. The inventory needs to be maintained to ensure that existing customer do not get cut off mistakenly or new customers are left without service due to insufficient resources. OSS can help address both these problems.

The last aspect of the new telecom billing system is that they have now moved from just single technology and single network solution to a multi-technology heterogeneous solution. The reason, again, is market driven. To retain customers and increase ARPU, most telecom service providers are promoting bundled services and triple play. Strong OSS systems are needed to achieve this.

In conclusion, telecom billing OSS is key to the modern day service providers. They add agility and flexibility to the ISP operations. They have been growing and evolving to adapt to the changing market demands to maintain the ISP competitiveness. Going forward, stable and versatile telecom billing software could become the defining factor of any ISPs services.

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