Telecom OSS System Evolution: A Brief Note

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:42:56 EST

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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Telecom OSS System Evolution: A Brief Note