Telecom Billing Software Evolution: A Brief Note

The telecom billing 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.

OSS systems are typically support systems that ensure the network is up and running. They ensure that customers are not left stranded without service and if they lose service, corrective action can be taken quickly. As the networks get more complex and more varied, the true benefits of OSS solutions become more and more evident.

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 EMS/NMS systems are very useful in managing the systems as they provide remote control and management features. The ISP can concentrate the majority of the network provisioning and monitoring operations in one location and save of costs. With a single network operations center running an NMS/EMS solution, the operator can upgrade, monitor and troubleshoot most software problems from a remote location.

Besides these management systems, the newer versions of OSS solutions comprise other aspects like Customer Management Systems, Business Management systems, Inventory Management system, etc. All these are newer additions that have come about to make the business more agile and mobile to changing customer demands.

Inventory management is probably the most important addition to OSS functions in recent times. With lot of planning and upgrading going on, keeping track of inventory is absolutely essential. The inventory needs to be maintained to ensure that existing customer do not get cut off mistakenly or new customers are left without service due to insufficient resources. OSS can help address both these problems.

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 OSS 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.

Finally, it can be summarized that going forward, ISPs will increasingly start relying on telcom billing OSS solutions to remain flexible and agile to market demands. The triple play solutions would be the next challenge and going forward there may be many more areas of operations optimization that ISPs would require. Dependable and scalable telecom OSS solutions are going to be in high demand.