Access technology is rapidly changing too, from landline to macro towers to the heterogeneous networks (HetNets) of the future that will utilize large numbers of small cells, Wi-Fi offload, and virtualization technologies such as SDN and NFV. In fact, the number of small cells was expected to outnumber that of macro cells by the end of last year, and Nokia Networks predicts that 80 percent of sites will be small cells by 2020. More and more, CSPs are turning to software-controlled self-organizing networks (SONs) to manage the increased complexity.

The service landscape has also completely evolved, from basic voice and texting to real-time video chatting, social networking, global social mobile gaming, streaming video, and more. With click-to-cloud applications, photo and video sharing and all types of mobile collaboration, users are increasingly adding to the upstream pipe, which wasn’t necessarily anticipated by traditional network planning. Nokia Networks estimates that the average user will consume one gigabyte of mobile data every day by 2020. Bill Payne, CEO of BroadView Communications, said that “the network must support a 1,000x increase in traffic” to accommodate the service needs of the future, and that it must be designed to “reduce latency to one millisecond for higher degrees of interactivity.” Hitting those kinds of numbers will require a new way of looking at the network, not to mention completely new management solutions.

Along with the development of advanced connectivity solutions, the number and variety of customers have grown. Verizon’s director of network and technology, Praveen Atreya, listed some of the verticals the CSP works in today, including healthcare, media, consumer, retail, public safety, utility, education, and enterprise.

Likewise, billing is more intricate than it once was. In its list of strategic predictions for 2013, Gartner wrote that “enterprises must manage multiple stores, payment processes, and licensing terms,” and that the personal cloud will soon replace the PC as the hub of the digital universe. As CSPs move into M2M and personal cloud, negotiate deals for global cellular and Wi-Fi roaming, build partnerships with numerous content providers, and become brokers of cloud services, the number of moving pieces in the world of billing will increase exponentially.

Just like the hunger for faster, sexier devices, the product and service life cycle has dramatically accelerated: CSPs can’t wait weeks for new services to be cataloged, provisioned, launched, billed for, and supported. The stunning success of OTT applications proves that time is of the essence in the new digital economy, requiring unprecedented speed and agility on the front and back end as well as information sharing across multiple functional groups.

It’s hard to imagine that in the not-so-distant past the competitive story in telecom centered on a “long-distance war,” because today the world’s largest voice-service provider is Skype, and OTT application, and mobile operators are offering voice for free. Of course, multiple-system operators (MSOs) such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable first turned up the heat with voice over IP (VoIP) service, and now companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have emerged as serious over-the-top competitors, making the sea of OTT applications that sap traditional revenue seem endless. Creating and executing a strategy that can challenge these opponents is a taller order than ever before.
The industry has responded with a variety of solutions that look more and more like ICE and less and less like traditional OSS or BSS solutions. Although convergence has been a popular topic, what’s developing is much grander, specifically “getting rid of the hundreds of legacy systems and siloed OSS stacks and replacing them with a single, centralized architecture,” says Phil Bull, a B2B marketing consultant who previously marketed OSS solutions for Amdocs. “It’s quite clear that the old model doesn’t work anymore. You’ve got to have an integrated OSS and BSS because processes are much more end to end, with a lot of shared infrastructure....The entities of IT and infrastructure have to come together. The processes are running across both IT and operations—you can’t separate them.”

Vendors such as Amdocs, Ericsson, NetCracker, Oracle, and SAP are slowly moving toward the use of terms like TOMS, short for “telecom operations management system". Gartner already aggregates OSS, BSS and service delivery platform (SDP) products under the TOMS heading when rating vendor solutions. In fact, Bull believes that, “it’s likely we will have moved away from the terms OSS and BSS in less than ten years.” Meanwhile, industry giant Ericsson has coined the term "ICT" or Integrated Communication Technology and Microsoft has been promoting "Communications and Media" solutions for some time. But what ever you call it, ICE technology (ICE-T?) looks like it is here to stay with vendors like CSG International redefining the notion of what OSS and BSS is by integrating rich content management with traditional OSS and BSS for something truly transformative.