The communications market has developed into a diverse networked society comprising consumers and businesses, which demand a range of content and applications. As a result, the requirement for advanced operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS) has increased. Further, the launch of 3G and 4G services has led to an increased demand for OSS and BSS solutions which can ensure content and service delivery, provide network gateways and manage digital rights. Apart from this, telecom operators increasingly require streamlined processes related to billing, inventory management and customer relationship management. With the advent of mobile number portability, customer retention has become a key concern for operators and they have started investing more in end-to-end systems that can track various parameters, predict the customer churn rate and enable online customer communication to prevent users from switching networks. Telecom operators are thus facing intense pressure to revamp their OSS/BSS solutions and adapt to their changing requirements.
tele.net takes a look at the key issues and challenges faced by telecom operators regarding the OSS/BSS requirements of the telecom sector?
- Migration from legacy systems: Indian telecom operators have independent and inflexible legacy systems, which often leads to additional costs due to process duplication. Moreover, developing a centralised OSS/BSS across all business verticals is a problem. The inflexibility causes issues in integration and consolidation of platforms. Since migration requires more time and leads to disruption of services, the main issue faced by operators is whether or not to migrate from such legacy systems in order to adopt next-generation technology.
- Convergence: Product convergence by telecom operators in the form of bundling and cross-product discounting requires strengthening the ordering and billing platforms. As a result, maintaining a convergent OSS and BSS platform has become a necessity for operators. This reduces the boundaries between OSS/BSS stacks and other interfacing systems, leading to inadequate process coverage. Further, the introduction of new services requires modifications to the existing BSS and OSS in order to handle the increased complexity in subscriber billing, which results in issues such as bill shocks, revenue settlements with multiple parties and interconnect billing. Operators often face problems in decision-making, for instance whether to modify the existing systems or to invest in new application components.
- Shift to next-generation technologies: The widespread adoption of 3G services and launch of 4G services has led to a transformation of the core network architecture, requiring next-generation OSS and BSS solutions. The solutions need to enable operators to identify sources of downtime, isolate the performance of each component in the end-to-end network infrastructure, and track rich media streaming services. Further, operators increasingly need OSS/BSS solutions that can help them compare their performance with that of their competitors. With the industry moving towards IP-based networks, OSS and BSS solutions will have to make way for rapid and accurate delivery of new services and provide subscribers greater options to control and customise services and applications.
- Cost pressures: Often, high operational costs are associated with legacy and new stacks for meeting new service/product requirements. As a result, operators have to make significant investments in IT infrastructure development. Established operators, which have already invested in OSS and BSS stacks, are now investing in replacing their existing systems with new systems. These unforeseen expenditures impact the finances of telecom operators, which already face high debt owing to spectrum payments. In addition, there are high risks associated with IT investments made by telecom operators.
- Revenue mismatch/loss: Issues such as under-billing, reconciliation of incorrect call records, inter-partner dispute settlement, inconsistent calculations and interconnect fraud account for the revenue losses registered by telecom operators. These issues usually result from process discontinuity, information gaps, and integration issues between network elements and interfacing systems. Therefore, operators require OSS/BSS solutions that are able to identify the source of the problem. This challenge is only set to grow as product portfolios become more complex and the time-to-market for new services reduces. In the coming years, there will be a growing demand for innovative OSS/BSS solutions which can anticipate and prevent revenue losses due to customer churn, market erosion and fraud practices.
In sum, the industry is seeking large-scale architectural changes in the existing OSS and BSS solutions, in order to adapt to next-generation technologies. The new solutions should be innovative and efficient in handling the complexity of networks. Going forward, new service delivery platforms are set to emerge, which will integrate diverse content sources and cater to customer preferences
