Voice and data are no longer the services that organisations, large and small, see as making a difference. The services that do make a difference are more dynamic and diverse – digital distribution, promotion and marketing, payments and billing, business intelligence, business continuity (including security) and more – the factors that make their organisations thrive.
Our OSS and BSS are currently complex due to all the network variants that they handle. But if customers don’t value the network (as a differentiator) then why are we putting so much effort / attention there? If customers want ubiquitous, secure data streams with digital services on top, then why aren’t we reducing network variants and correspondingly reducing complexity in our network-based OSS / BSS?
That will give us the head-room to enhance our tools and ramp up the digital services that organisations do value.
Customers like options. But if all the options are available on the digital services / bundles, customers won’t really care if they’re delivered over a network stream that has almost no variants. This also allows a transition to more of a consumption-based model rather than all the variants of speeds and feeds and protocols.
The big challenge here is convincing the networks teams to ramp down and allow digital teams to ramp up. That concept won’t go down too well at most service providers though will it?