Telecom site management is becoming seemingly crucial in today’s competitive telecom landscape. There is a shift from a conventional mobile network operator (MNO) towards an independent tower or an MNO captive. Such transformation allows MNOs and telecom infrastructure providers and operators to stay ahead and focus more on customer acquisition strategies.

Besides towers, a host of other gear can be investigated in the form of fiber, data center, and small cells that can also gain attention. With the coming of 5G, there will be a new evolution in infrastructure that can be fiber backhaul, tower reinforcement, edge computing, and hyper-scale data center. Such infra will ideally involve huge CAPEX requirements; this is also changing with tower which are becoming digital network infrastructure providers.  

Current Scenario

Usually when two large companies merge, it often takes a while – years in some cases – before processes get redesigned to span all departments, and the new organization settles into a lean and profitable machine and the same is true of OSS/BSS. These systems have been designed for two different purposes: to keep the network operational and to keep it profitable. But today’s demanding networks need the functions of both systems to work together, and to work across the varying lifecycles of products and services.

The need for next-gen OSS/BSS Solutions

Operating Support Systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS) are becoming key to telecom infra providers and operators. With rapid digitization, more emphasis is on personalization, seamless service usage, and providing enhanced customer experience is part of the operator business today.

Understanding operating support systems (OSS) consists of software tools to analyze the telecom network’s overall operations. This is more to do with operational aspects to telecom site management. This is mainly used by building teams, sales, key account managers, property real estate managers, network planners, service designers, operations, and engineering teams.

In contrast, Business Support Systems (BSS) shaped up the customer part, enabling telecom infra providers in handling all the business and customer-facing aspects of telecom site management. It includes defining billing parameters, service fulfilment, revenue management, customer management, order management, product catalogs, and charging.

Working with OSS and BSS in telecom is essential as they are considered the gateway to managing the entire telecom site. With tech advancements in cloud and analytics, the automated business process is also helping this cause.

The OSS usually forwards service requests and supplies information to BSS, and BSS gets to focus on managing business aspects related to site management. OSS will handle order management site inventory and cover operations and maintenance in broader terms. At the same time, BSS will include service fulfilment, customer and Product Management, contract management, and billing and revenue.

To maximize opportunities, operators often plan their OSS/BSS architecture based on the following metrics:

● OSS and BSS can be used to initiate revenues

● Design OSS and BSS so that it can retain revenues & customers

● OSS and BSS need a design to collect revenues

● OSS and BSS should be planned in a manner to optimize profitability

● OSS and BSS should be able to operationalize the assets

With the surge in cloud computing, the demand for cloud OSS/BSS has risen, and the industry is adapting to these changes as well and requires the need for OSS/BSS tools that consider factor-like swift deployment and scalability, demand for more streamlined billing systems, providing enhanced customer experiences. Besides, the revenue management system is also changing, making more than just a case for OSS/BSS to make those changes.

End Note

Moving ahead, the OSS and BSS systems run on service layer architecture and are engaged in shifting to a more cloud-native architecture. Benefits of this model are numerous – business and workforce agility, speed to market, immense scalability to cope with varying demands, speed to innovate, and cost optimization. With more cloudification taking place, and rapid digitization happening all around, more communication service providers (CSPs) are looking to move their OSS/BSS to the cloud-native platforms. 

Industry leading network aggregators like STL have it all will their cutting-edge game changing BSS solutions and will help CSPs make their digital journey with ease. Take a look at what STL is offering to enterprises and CSPs for a seamless OSS/BSS transformation.