Telecom OSS System Evolution: A Brief Note
Telecom OSS systems have been the latest trend in the growth of the
telecommunications field in general. Over the years, ISPs have gone from
increasing the number of customers to increasing their network
capacity, to more recently delivering greater bandwidth to their
customers.
All along they have had to create and destroy network
architectures. The present day telecom network is a medley of various
generations of technologies and services. The OSS systems are very
useful in managing these myriad solutions.
OSS systems are typically support systems that ensure the network is up
and running. They ensure that customers are not left stranded without
service and if they lose service, corrective action can be taken
quickly. As the networks get more complex and more varied, the true
benefits of OSS solutions become more and more evident.
Telecom OSS solutions of the modern day have mainly evolved around the
demands of ISPs to remain agile to market demands. The first challenge
in the ISP growth is to manage the thousands of network elements that
have been deployed. This is the reason why the first OSS solutions were
Element Management Systems (EMS) and Network Management Systems (NMS).
The EMS solutions tend to be vendor specific and manage solutions from
just one vendor. The NMS are broader and can manage elements from
various vendors.
The NMS/ EMS systems are basically remote management systems that can
monitor and configure network elements from a remote location. This
provides the ISP with the ability to centralize the monitoring
operations and get big costs savings. Through remote operations, most of
the errors in the network can be detected to the extent that the exact
cause and area of fault can be pinpointed. This means the service
technician doesn't spend time locating the problem.
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 system warrants a special mention among the newer
OSS features. This is because over the years, network inventory has
become a very important aspect of the system. This is not just the
inventory stored in the warehouses, but also inventory in the live
network. This information is critical while planning a major service
roll-out or upgrade. Accurate inventory is very important for successful
service delivery.
While in the earlier part of the article we have looked as different
aspects of the network, the way forward for OSS systems would be
integration of different networks and topologies running different
technology. With ISPs moving towards triple play solutions, the OSS
systems need to evolve to support these triple play deployments. All the
EMS/ NMS, Customer / Business Management Systems, et al, need to adapt
to this heterogeneous solution.
Finally, it can be summarized that going forward, ISPs will increasingly
start relying on telecom OSS solutions to remain flexible and agile to
market demands. The triple play solutions would be the next challenge
and going forward there may be many more areas of operations
optimization that ISPs would require. Dependable and scalable telecom billing OSS solutions are going to be in high demand.
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