The one person, two day, OSS challenge

For all of the OSS and BSS vendors out there, I’d like to issue you a challenge. Can one person who’s not yet familiar with your solution (but has pre-requisite skills) set up your OSS / BSS product and demonstrate your product’s most essential use-cases with their own data / configurations and then demo to […]

Want to know where the next wave of OSS/BSS innovation is coming from?

Everything you know right now, and all the knowledge you have collected over your career, is diminishing in relevance at an increasing rate. For those of us who’ve been in this game for decades rather than years, a lot of the knowledge we accumulated during our “apprenticeship” years is losing its lustre. This is particularly […]

Do you know what the most widely used OSS/BSS application is?

As the title asks, do you know what the most widely used OSS/BSS application is? The answer might actually surprise you, but we’ll get to that a little later in the article. Late last year, we published an article that outlined that a A seismic shift is already underway in IT circles and how it […]

What can OSS learn from Google and ChatGPT?

There were plenty of search engines before Google came along and grabbed a lot of the search market share. There were plenty of generative AI solutions before ChatGPT appeared and created a large amount of buzz too. The question is why did they grab attention / users and what can we learn from that to […]

Is innovationism, not capitalism, driving the decline in telco?

It’s a completely silly question to ask you whether you’ve noticed that the world of OSS is changing rapidly isn’t it? Of course you’ve already noticed that it has and is. Do you already have plans to learn new concepts to help you adapt to those changes in 2023? If so, are you thinking about […]

OSS User Interfaces or User Interactions? GUIs or MUIs?

The cool part of this time of year, the holiday period, is that it prompts you to look backwards and look forwards. To be honest, writing articles here on the blog prompts me to do that throughout the year too, but there does tend to be a bit more downtime for reflection around the boundary […]

The tree analogy – a tale of two eras of telco business models

With the holidays almost upon us in many parts of the world, I thought I’d share an analogy. Like many analogies, it’s a bit oversimplified. It’s also possibly a bit inflammatory in some circles. Hopefully though, it gives a different frame of reference for how the telco business model has changed over the years. More […]

A seismic shift is happening

A seismic shift is happening that will change the world of OSS/BSS so fundamentally in the next few years that it totally blows my mind. It will be the biggest in my 20+ year career in the telco industry. The following pic is from an IA Summit Keynote by Charles Lamanna, the Corporate VP of […]

There’s no competition for OSS cookbooks making food out of soccer balls

Seth Godin recently wrote a brilliant article that describes the craziness of seeking a market with no competition. In entirety, his article goes like this: “There’s no competition for cookbooks on making food out of soccer balls and hockey pucks. There’s no competition for software that charges you to find out the temperature on Mars. There’s no […]

Exciting week for augmented ways of working in telco

Last week was kind of exciting (and a bit manic!). As well as working on a tech due-diligence (DD) and an important client OSS/BSS roadmap, I had the chance to witness some important steps in the progression on telco Augmented Reality (AR) use-cases. On the software side, we already have many exciting use-cases lining up […]

Drawing parallels between Cloud Native, Cloud Enabled and Data Native, Data Enabled

Just sharing a playful analogy to end the week (and month). Like me, you’ve probably heard lots of conversations that contrast cloud-enabled applications with cloud-native. We’ve heard the arguments that an OSS or BSS application might be “on the cloud,” but not really the gold-standard “cloud-native.” We know there are lots of legacy OSS / […]

Upcoming “Inventory of the Future” webinar

Earlier in the year, Omdia commissioned Passionate About OSS to write a report about the future of network inventory. Not just how the tools themselves are changing, but how they might be used, the new ways of working that will be centred around them, how migration strategies are changing and much more. Now in conjunction […]

Passive devices don’t ping…. Or do they?

As we all know, data quality can be a big problem for OSS, at almost every operator around the world. A lot of this problem stems from the fact that most telcos have a lot of passive infrastructure / objects in their networks. Passive devices don’t tend to have programmatic interfaces that allows for current […]

New OSS Innovation Video Recording

The \#Adtran #FibreBroadband Symposium was held in Melbourne on 3rd August 2022. This video link below shows the presentation we made at the conference: It’s designed specifically for network builders, to show the relevance that OSS and BSS have for their worlds. It also shows a very high level view of OSS past, present and future – […]

How AI and blast radii could inspire next-gen OSS designs

Artificial Intelligence is purported to be the panacea for so many high-volume factors within telco. For example, AI is being used for complex pattern recognition using diverse signal streams like churn reduction. AIOps solutions are making great strides to reducing noise within alarm / event lists, filtering and automating, to limit the number of decisions […]

Why KPIs, QoS and QoE aren’t good enough. What else must we do

Earlier this week we talked about the data management challenge being solved, for the most part. However, we still have large gaps in the decision support challenge, mostly because we don’t have tools to help us understand the complex “systems / environments” in which decisions need to be made. I thought the graph below might […]

What is the Exciting Next Frontier of OSS Solution Development?

A discussion with an OSS vendor last week reminded me of an article, and a lecture by Mark Zangari that inspired it, which is now nearly 10 years old. It’s worth revisiting because the challenges described are still relevant for OSS today, still not adequately resolved. At the time, Mark described for his audience at SFU […]

Flying COWs and OSS. A game-changer for Capacity Management?

A recent article here talked about re-imagining the planning and design process for telco networks. We’ve also been heavily involved with the use of drones to help deliver new ways of working in the telco industry lately too. With those two concepts still fresh in our memory, this article about flying COWs from AT&T really […]

Re-imagining network planning? New approaches to plan, design & build networks

In a recent article, we posed many ideas about how future OSS solutions might be re-imagined. We looked into how new approaches and technologies like AR (Augmented Reality) might change solutions and ways-of-working in the near future. This article triggered a conversation about next-generation planning systems with a couple of very clever OSS, orchestration and […]