Telecom Billing OSS - Telecom Billing OSS And Its Importance To You

Jun.09, 2010 in Computers

The telecom OSS has been the latest trend in the growth of the telecommunications field in general. Over the years, ISPs have gone from increasing the number of customers to increasing their network capacity, to more recently delivering greater bandwidth to their customers. All along they have had to create and destroy network architectures. The present day telecom network is a medley of various generations of technologies and services. The OSS systems are very useful in managing these myriad solutions.

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.

Telecom OSS solutions of the modern day have mainly evolved around the demands of ISPs to remain agile to market demands. The first challenge in the ISP growth is to manage the thousands of network elements that have been deployed. This is the reason why the first OSS solutions were Element Management Systems (EMS) and Network Management Systems (NMS). The EMS solutions tend to be vendor specific and manage solutions from just one vendor. The NMS are broader and can manage elements from various vendors.

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 system warrants a special mention among the newer OSS features. This is because over the years, network inventory has become a very important aspect of the system. This is not just the inventory stored in the warehouses, but also inventory in the live network. This information is critical while planning a major service roll-out or upgrade. Accurate inventory is very important for successful service delivery.

While in the earlier part of the article we have looked as different aspects of the network, the way forward for OSS systems would be integration of different networks and topologies running different technology. With ISPs moving towards triple play solutions, the telecom billing software need to evolve to support these triple play deployments. All the EMS/ NMS, Customer / Business Management Systems, et al, need to adapt to this heterogeneous solution.

In conclusion, Telecom Billing Software is key to the modern day service providers. They add agility and flexibility to the ISP operations. They have been growing and evolving to adapt to the changing market demands to maintain the ISP competitiveness. Going forward, stable and versatile Telecom Billing Solution could become the defining factor of any ISPs services.