Telco services that are bigger, faster, better and the OSS that supports that

We all know of the tectonic shifts in the world of telco services, profitability and business models.

One common trend is for telcos to offer pipes that are bigger and faster. Seems like a commoditising business model to me, but our OSS still need to support that. How? Through enabling efficiency at scale. Building tools, GUIs, workflows, integrations, sales pipelines, etc that enable telcos march seamlessly towards offering ever bigger/faster pipes. An OSS/BSS stack that supports this could represent one of the few remaining sustainable competitive advantages, so any such OSS/BSS could be highly valuable to its owner.

But if the bigger/faster pipe model is commoditising and there’s little differentiation between competing telcos’ OSS/BSS on service activation, then what is the alternative? Services that are better? But what is “better”? More to the point, what is sustainably better (ie can’t be easily copied by competitors)? Services that are “better” are likely to come in many different forms, but they’re unlikely to be related to the pipe (except maybe reliability / SLA / QoS). They’re more likely to be in the “bundling,” which may include premium content, apps, customer support, third-party products, etc. An OSS/BSS that is highly flexible in supporting any mix of bundling becomes important. Product / service catalogs are one of many possible examples.

An even bigger differentiator is not bigger / faster / better, but different (if perceived by the market as being invaluably different). The challenge with being different is that “different” tends to be fleeting. It tends to only last for a short period of time before competitors catch up. Since many of the differences available to telco services are defined in software, the window of opportunity is getting increasingly short… except when it comes to the OSS/BSS being able to operationalise that differentiator. It’s not uncommon for a new feature to take 9+ months to get to market, with changes to the OSS/BSS taking up a significant chunk of the project’s critical path. Having an OSS/BSS stack that can repeatedly get a product / feature to market much faster than competing telcos provides greater opportunity to capture the market during the window of difference.

If this article was helpful, subscribe to the Passionate About OSS Blog to get each new post sent directly to your inbox. 100% free of charge and free of spam.

Our Solutions

Share:

Most Recent Articles

No telco wants to buy an OSS/BSS

When you’re a senior exec in a telco and you’ve been made responsible for allocating resources, it’s unlikely that you ever think, “gee, we really

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.