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Further, with great bandwidth comes greater responsibility for quality. Take streaming video; it is massively popular — and a lot of it is free. If customers are going to pay for it, operators must deliver it with extremely high quality. The pressure on service quality is growing because traffic volume is exploding, but also because customer expectations are tough to meet. Services need to be available on-demand, and with the touch of a button, in many instances. A weak service will be skewered in social media circles, which in turn has a real impact on the operator, as several well-publicized examples have shown in recent months.
Under such scrutiny, partnerships must
be set up to succeed out of the gate.
OSS/BSS needs to make it easy to
create partner-centric services that can
be delivered with great quality. This in
turn calls for greater optimization of
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"We’ve already reached the point where it doesn’t make sense for an operator to create problems for itself by driving more complexity into billing." |
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We’ve already reached the point where it doesn’t make sense for an operator to create problems for itself by driving more complexity into billing. It’s time to make it simpler, save a lot of pain, reduce long-term costs and risks, and focus on monetizing network investments. It simply doesn’t make sense to spend hundreds of millions to build ultra-complex billing infrastructures when services are becoming more application-oriented, more discrete, or one-time transaction-based, and when the market expects more flat-rate options for infrastructure services.
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network and service resources and for
workforce optimization, so new
networks and features stand up on
time and in line with deadline
commitments for new service launches
and the campaigns that drive them.
There are many interdependent parts
in this overall equation, and they all tie
back to an OSS/BSS infrastructure that
plays roles in efficiency, quality, and
orchestration across network, service,
and partner boundaries.
In contrast to all of this service complexity is the idea that traditional approaches to billing aren’t relevant anymore. Pricing and billing models that involve confusing rating rules based on different categories of usage or time of day are too complex for partners and especially for customers. Billing infrastructure needs to become simpler, focusing on flat-rated and transaction-based services.
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Now and Next
This is not the time to fool around with risky approaches to OSS/BSS or to overlook it as a back office cost center. The foundation for LTE, in terms of service delivery, network management, workforce management, and billing needs to be seamless and efficient. It needs to deliver value rapidly, in step with the cost and go-to-market demands that LTE, and subsequent generations, bring with them. OSS/BSS needs to: enable customers’ and partners’ experiences end to end, and top to bottom; keep things simple for partners and customers; set the stage for high-quality service and positive public perception; and drive consistent market delivery through multiple generations in the emerging gigabit society.
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