The telecommunications market space has seen a lot of changes from the simple telephone days to the present day triple play solutions. While the initial phase of telecom landscape was defined by getting in more bandwidth in the network, followed by providing bigger pipes to consumer, the present day challenge is being more agile and quicker to react to market needs and demands. The VOIP Billing is key in these new rules of the land.
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.
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.
With the fast expanding networks, inventory management has become a key challenge for many operators. There are two aspects to this problem: for one the inventory details are important for planning and expansion – the ISP would never want to run out of capacity after committing a client service. Secondly, this inventory needs to be accurate. Inaccurate inventory can lead to incorrect service design and hence delayed service delivery.
The next phase of telecom billing system would be becoming versatile to handle any technology, any solution and any network deployment situation. This is critical as all ISPs are now pushing for triple play solutions to attract customers and retain them. In such an environment, the OSS systems need to be equally strong to allow the ISP to deliver these services in a timely fashion.
In conclusion, telecom billing system 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 system could become the defining factor of any ISPs services.