Telecom Billing System – How It’s Getting Better Every Day

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 Telecom billing system is key in these new rules of the land.

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.

Over the years, as the ISP requirements grew, the OSS systems evolved. Today, it is not just EMS/ NMS, but it also encompasses Customer Management Systems, Business Management Systems, Inventory Management Systems, etc. These evolutions help ISP tackle different pain areas of rapidly growing network operations to meet customer demands better.

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 BSS/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.

All in all, telecom billing OSS is the key components in modern ISP growth. The telecom billing OSS can help the service providers build and operate better systems and networks. Better networks translate into better services making for better customer experience.

Tags: bss/oss, oss software, telecom billing system, telecom oss, VOIP Billing, voip billing system