Telecom OSS – Your Business Needs One Immediately
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.
OSS stands for Operational Support Systems and as the name suggests it is for supporting the network operations. Even ISP has invested a lot of money in installing a resource base to provide high bandwidth solution to the customers and in more recent times also provide wireless services. With growing network size and complexity, managing and supporting it is becoming a tough challenge. OSS systems can help tackle this challenge.
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 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.
With the growing market demands and changing equations, the scope of OSS solutions increased from network element management to customer and business management and more importantly to inventory management solutions. These new solutions are vital for the ISP to maintain its edge over the competition. Without good management systems, in today's complex networks losing track of things is not tough.
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 VOIP billing system 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.
All in all, telecom billing solution is the key components in modern ISP growth. The telecom billing solution can help the service providers build and operate better systems and networks. Better networks translate into better services making for better customer experience.