How Telecom OSS Systems Evolved

The telecommunications market space has seen a lot of changes from the simple telephone days to the present day triple play solutions. While the initial phase of telecom landscape was defined by getting in more bandwidth in the network, followed by providing bigger pipes to consumer, the present day challenge is being more agile and quicker to react to market needs and demands. Telecom OSS systems are key in these new rules of the land.

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.

One of the earlier OSS solutions to hit the market was EMS solutions or Element Management Systems. These were management solutions provided by a single network equipment vendor to manage their network elements in the ISP network. However, with growing business and competition among vendors, ISPs have diversified their networks to have elements from different vendors. This way they can de-risk dependence on a single source. This led to the NMS, or Network Management System, evolution that could manage elements in such a heterogeneous environment.

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 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 next phase of OSS solutions would be becoming versatile to handle any technology, any solution and any network deployment situation. This is critical as all ISPs are now pushing for triple play solutions to attract customers and retain them. In such an environment, the OSS systems need to be equally strong to allow the ISP to deliver these services in a timely fashion.