By: Thomas Vasen

The borderline between OSS and BSS is blurring as control of networks and activities becomes a new front in the battle against churn. Operators are being driven to introduce new processes and management tools in order to deliver network services like mobile broadband in an effective and profitable way. This is because it’s not just delivering the services that matters; it’s delivering them in a way that maximizes their impact and enables their bottom-line revenue potential to be reached.

In light of this reality, there is an increasing need for a new generation of Operating Support Systems (OSS) which encompass the growing and increasingly important functions of analytics and service assurance. For instance, new use cases that analyze service rather than network resources are rapidly becoming critical. Analytics based on dimensions such as subscribers, handsets, and location, all of which are reliant on raw transactional data collected from the network, are becoming central to competitive strategy.

But where do operators look for answers – and solutions – that address these challenges? It’s an important question, because new applications that blur the line between traditional OSS and BSS functions open up possibilities for the service provider to make the best use of its resources and achieve greater performance while, at the same time, satisfying customers’ needs.

Today, the telecoms market is undergoing a dramatic shift in requirements placed on traditional analytics and OSS systems. These have historically been based on processing aggregated counter data but now need to be adapted to accommodate raw event data at higher volumes and in real-time.

Furthermore, network quality is central to defining service experience. Yet, despite this, misconfiguration, damaged equipment, failed upgrades and handset-related problems have historically often gone undetected for long periods. Without the proper tools for creating and acting on information at the network, customer and session-levels, hidden service problems, lack of root-cause analysis and a failure of pro-active retention activity will lead to churn. This reality demands a new set of management tools.

Extending OSS with service performance means new insights and perspectives

Traditionally OSS tools have been network-centric, displaying node health and performance via agreed KPI metrics. This type of OSS monitoring will continue to be an essential part of network management; but, in addition to this, effective service assurance is also required.

Here, the focus is on measuring how well services are performing and how performance actually affects the subscribers’ service experience. Once service assurance is added to traditional, network-centric OSS, service performance data can be contextualized to deliver impact analysis from an individual customer perspective.