If you found this article useful or valuable, subscribe (in the top-right corner of this page) and share. Let's spread the word and inspire more people to become passionate about OSS. Ryan is Passionate About OSS and has dedicated the last two decades to sharing his passion for OSS with the world. He is a founder, author, blogger, Engineer, connector and inquisitive learner about OSS and managing networks. To find out a little about his back-story and why he's so Passionate About OSS, click on the About Page. To connect with Ryan and the PAOSS team, click on the Contact page.
Like microservices before it, AI and agentic solutions are increasingly seen as the panacea of digital transformation. In telco circles, AI is often framed as the fastest path to escape. A way to finally move beyond the clunky, legacy worlds of OSS/BSS. Piecemeal AI projects promise quick wins, modern capabilities, and a stepping stone towards […]
We speak with buyers and sellers every week, and one word keeps repeating. Trust. It keeps appearing in buyer conversations and seller conversations alike. It’s more than a word though. It’s costing the telco industry millions. When trust is missing, 18-24 month buying cycles become the default. This is the Buyer – Seller Chasm that […]
The promise is simple: let AI handle the easy work, and humans focus on the hard work, the challenging work, the fun work. But the hard work is hard because it depends on intuition and experience that comes from years of guidance doing the easy work (the apprenticeship). So if AI handles all of the […]
I’d always assumed that more feedback loops meant better control, and faster / smarter / optimal operations. But what happens when each system has its own idea of what “smart” or “optimal” even means? Are we, in fact, optimising our way into instability and inefficiency? Could hundreds of competing feedback loops be automating misalignment faster […]
We’re already seeing it. AI is slowly infiltrating telecom, one little project at a time… monitoring, automating, optimising. In AI, we have one of the most disruptive opportunities of our lifetime, but the results of telco AI projects to date still feel eerily familiar. Are most telcos using tomorrow’s tools with yesterday’s thinking? Maybe the […]
We know telco customers want faster speeds.But is it possible that we’re focussed on the wrong type of speed?Here’s a hint: the real drag isn’t line-speed. . “Finally”: The Message that Triggered an Article Late last week a friend pinged me with a SpeedTest screenshot and a single word: “finally.” I was confused. At first […]
Ever noticed how many OSS decisions are made by people who have never set foot on site? What if your single most powerful OSS upgrade this year is a day riding shotgun with field techs in a hi-viz vest? This article digs into the quiet damage that OSS experts with a total lack of field […]
Are you frustrated by the complexity of your OSS/BSS factory? With hundreds or even thousands of systems, all trying to juggle thousands of activities without dropping the ball is like organised chaos. But what if we’re looking at it all wrong, both in the way we’ve always designed our legacy application architectures and how we’re […]
Are you worried that your OSS/BSS stack, or parts of it, might be in desperate need of an overhaul? Many OSS experts love being archaeologists, down on their knees, carefully brushing off the dust to unearth their OSS fossil and painstakingly preserving it. But modern network operations aren’t archaeological digs. We can’t just make educated guesses […]
The story of Berkshire Hathaway is a famous one. It started in textiles but Warren Buffett chose to drastically change strategy because the textiles industry was dying. You’d have to say his decision has proven to be correct. If it stayed in textiles, Buffett would almost certainly not be as famous as he is today. […]
Most OSS/BSS roadmaps today overflow with novelty and buzz. You might even hear the words Agentic AI come up (not that I have anything against it but it can be a little over-hyped at times). But this series has taken a different path. We’ve looked at how to build a model that looks for enduring […]
Modern telco software roadmaps tend to be full of novel features. But what if none of that novelty is enduring? What if the silhouette of the Porsche 911 guides us on what should be included in our next OSS roadmap? The City Map From article 1 in this series, The Lindy Effect tells us that […]
After a major outage, we conduct PIRs (Post Incident Reviews). If we find something, we usually add controls. But when you think about it, that’s a bit like bandages on an infected wound – more layers, more failure points and potentially even a wider blast radius. The durable fix is more clinical: identify and remove […]
When you’re planning your next-generation OSS/BSS roadmap, what’s guiding your decisions? Are you looking for and/or researching features that have never been seen before? Are you finding new problems to solve? That’s our (my) typical mindset isn’t it? What if I instead pointed you to a little-known framework that looks deep into the past to […]
According to Russ Hill, IBM had 27 top priorities in the 1990s, and only 3 of them aligned. Telcos today aren’t far off. The cost? Misaligned missions and fragmented customer outcomes. When Lou Gerstner took over IBM in 1993, he found a company with no shortage of smart people or strategies or good intentions. But […]
You’re in the business of OSS sales (we’re all in the business of OSS sales if we want to work on an OSS project). Your OSS sales assets are full of facts, features and benefits. That fits perfectly for every buyer who thinks and says their procurement decisions are logical and calculated. Just one problem: […]
This is a story about a scene from The Matrix. It starts like the telco industry. Fearful of change. Locked into systems they can’t seem to escape. But then there’s a twist. Bang! The woman in the red dress doesn’t just walk past me. She hits me right between the eyes. This is the […]
Telcos are drowning in data, but few treat it as a managed, strategic asset. Without governance, OSS initiatives falter under poor quality, fragmented and inconsistent information. Data quality decays over time. Without the right governance, poor data can send your systems and processes into a death spiral, no matter how good they are. Taking a […]
Telcos are built for resilience.But when a critical exchange burned to the ground in regional Australia, it exposed the industry’s greatest weakness and its greatest strength are one and the same: the ability to adapt. What happened to Warrnambool Exchange in 2012 wasn’t just a fire. It was a story that shattered the commonly held […]
The answer is a categorical no! Telco was once the place for moonshot thinkers and industry-shaping tech. Do you remember when telco was exciting? When engineers solved big problems and OSS was a creative playground? Unfortunately, telco today has a growing energy crisis. Not just in its tower sites and data centres, but an energy […]
