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However, if you take a look at the NTCA (National Telecommunications Cooperative Association), an organization that represents small and rural telecom operators in the US, you’ll find some 570 members. That’s 570 companies that may not have the financial and technical wherewithal or the enormous customer bases that the RBOCs have, but who could benefit from a wide array of OSS/BSS solutions that allow their customers the same level of service that the big guys offer.
How do they get that? It’s clear that
the resource gap, with regard to
personnel and spend on systems, is
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There are 570 small telcos in the U.S. that could benefit from OSS/BSS services hosted on the cloud. |
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Vendors Taking the Plunge
It is in this context that we see the appeal of the cloud. We saw one big development on this front last year when Subex rolled out its ROCcloud solution, which gives small and medium telcos a lot of the same functionality they’d find in Subex’s license-based product suite without the massive upfront cost.
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vast between the small carrier and the
massive RBOC, and while the scale of
deployment is generally much smaller,
the baseline complexity is still
essentially the same.
For providers like small and rural carriers, headcount is small, so system monitoring, billing, charging, provisioning, and other complex and ongoing services work best if they are largely automated and require very little increase in staff.
In addition, the traditional, license-based software distribution model is expensive enough for a major carrier with millions of subs. For rural providers with a few thousand the cost is untenable.
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It’s an appealing proposition for the smaller CSP, and Subex isn’t alone in heading down that road. cVidya has pushed its revenue assurance solutions into the cloud, as well, launching an SaaS version of its fraud management/revenue assurance offerings last fall. The new solution, dubbed cVidyaCloud, is also aimed at the smaller service providers looking to compete directly against larger players.
In both cases, support system providers are identifying the cloud as a pathway to the group of service providers for whom their traditional solutions are out of reach or simply not a priority. And these vendors aren’t alone. There are others who have begun to reach through the cloud to touch CSPs that would have been beyond their grasp, traditionally.
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