Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

How our OSS can enhance customer experiences and perceptions for the telcos we work for

In a recent article, we compared how telco holds itself accountable to its internally adored five-nine availability standards, yet still has cellar-dwelling customer satisfaction scores. When you consider the expanse and complexity of the global telco network, and the millions of micro-events that occur on it each day, telco networks are amazingly resilient. Telcos certainly have a customer perception problem despite the great work they do…

23/08/2023 No Comments

How budget and mindset shapes OSS procurement differently for T1 and T2 carriers

Large carriers (let's call them T1's) tend to approach OSS procurement projects very differently from small to medium sized carriers (let's call them T2's). This is mostly driven by budget, or more to the point, how the budget frames the thinking. We'll also show you how drawing on ideas from the T2 approach can actually make T1 OSS projects more cost-effective, timely and less risky. A…

10/08/2023 2 Comments

OSS: A world of 12-day weeks and nuclear launch codes

I really enjoy the musings of Jason Fried. He blogs over here at 37signals, has written books such as "Re-work" and runs a successful (bootstrapped) software company. I enjoy his musings because they take a much more pragmatic and balanced look at the worlds of software development and business than most. Let's look at his recent post about 12-day work-weeks when many others are espousing a…

08/08/2023 No Comments

Telco innovation: 13 examples of harnessing OSS for super-charged experimentation

We know the modern digital marketplace is evolving and proliferating at mind-blowing speeds. Everything you know right now, and all the knowledge you have collected over your career, is diminishing in relevance at an increasing rate. The same is true of us as individuals as well as us as the telco industry and the companies within it. It's not that telcos are failing to innovate, but…

02/08/2023 No Comments

What’s your OSS Linda Evangelista Number?

Linda Evangelista, a supermodel back in the day, was famously quoted as saying, "I don't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day." When conducting vendor selection processes with my clients, I tend to find the "OSS Linda Evangelista number" quite helpful. It's the minimum dollar amount that a vendor will be prepared to accept to implement their solution as an OSS project. For…

27/07/2023 No Comments

Oh, sorry. I had it in 2D. Good luck!

Have you ever worked out in the field, turning design packs / drawings prepared by colleagues in your design team into built network? Have you ever worked at head office (eg the NOC) and interacted with your colleagues out in the field? If you have, you'll know there's often a disconnect in situational awareness between back-office / remote and field workers. The comment at 1:45 in…

25/07/2023 No Comments

If only the rest of the world could live up to the telco five-nines standard

The world relies on telecommunications providers for so much of our modern lifestyle. Yet the telco industry consistently fails to impress customers. Telcos interminably underperform on NPS (Net Promoter Score) metrics, such as the benchmark report from customergauge.com: Stone...Cold...Last!! Yet against this backdrop, the telco industry has always held itself to incredibly high engineering standards - our beloved "Five-Nines" availability metric. That's 99.999% uptime for the…

18/07/2023 No Comments

The five D’s of automation

Automation is an exciting ambition in the world of digital transformation. Everyone aspires to implement a lot of it. It gives you leverage, allowing you to do more with less. Who wouldn't want that? There are two main problems with automations though: For many scenarios, the cost of automation outweighs the benefit. Either the benefit is low (you're automating something that doesn't move the needle, especially…

14/07/2023 No Comments

OSS cynics get airtime. OSS optimists deliver

There are always many ways to transform your OSS aren't there? There are always lots of different options to analyse (which can lead to analysis paralysis, but that's a whole other story). In most cases, there are obvious pros and cons of each different option. Therefore, there are always lots of different opinions on the best approach. Moreover, there are also many different ideologies when it…

11/07/2023 No Comments

Avoiding telco black swans: Insights from the airline industry

For many of us, telco network downtime is more of a nuisance than a critical event. But for some mission critical and life-critical use-cases (like e-Health scenarios), telecommunications networks are certainly not just nice-to-have. They have to be available for every second of every day of every year. It has recently dawned on me that there are a large proportion of Sev1s (severity 1 incidents that…

04/07/2023 No Comments

Two new products to help you kick-start your next OSS project

There's only one way that OSS and BSS can get better - clients need to invest in them, which in turn convinces vendors to invest in product development. There's a simple sequence of events: The demonstrable delivery of value by OSS to an organisation, which Justifies the allocation of budget to your organisation's OSS, and also Helps to provide the numbers to substantiate business cases for…

26/06/2023 No Comments

The OSS fireplace that is running out of heat

There's an old parable from Earl Nightingale that I think about every day in terms of the OSS industry and the business operations of Passionate About OSS. Earl was a motivational speaker and author known for his inspiring teachings. He gained prominence in the 1950s and continued his work until his passing in 1989. One of his famous parables is the story of the fireplace giving…

20/06/2023 No Comments

Network Resilience Engineering: The Role of Operational Support Systems (OSS)

Operational Support Systems (OSS) perform many business-critical functions for network operators, as shown in the diagram below. They are the connectors and the profit engine behind any communications network. As indicated above, the assurance flows help to retain revenues and customers. OSS are an insurance policy for a telco's brand, or at least the technology aspects of reputation and brand value. A major contributor to that…

15/06/2023 No Comments

The next OSS breakthrough: Accessibility

Our motto at Passionate About OSS is, "Removing complexity from OSS." Sadly, we're awash with complexity in our industry. If most OSS were represented as a board game, they'd look something like this: Image sourced from https://technabob.com Would you know how to play this game without instructions? Even if you had instructions, it could take many months to master. I almost wonder whether this is a…

08/06/2023 No Comments

The Apple Vision Pro is here: It’s an indicator to how immersive next-gen OSS/BSS will shape our connected futures

Yesterday's release of Apple's Vision Pro virtual reality headsets [actually, they're not quite here like the headline says yet - apparently they're becoming available in early 2024] provides just one more piece of evidence that our ways of interacting, communicating and working in telco are set for a transformative shift. Not just in telco, but with telco, across every industry. Yet, as astounding as these devices…

06/06/2023 No Comments

How the TowerCo carve-out model is inspiring new ways of thinking about old telco assets

In a recent blog series, we described the potential for OSS to help drive entirely new revenue / business-models that leverage the many strengths that telcos retain - Telco’s burning exchange moment – a playbook of fixes. Today's article will take a closer look at one of the ideas under Playbook #7 - They have real-estate in highly valuable locations - and how that could influence…

30/05/2023 No Comments

I’ve just been blown away again by another really revolutionary demonstration

Earlier in the week, I shared a really exciting video from EnterpriseWeb (in collaboration with KX and Microsoft in particular). Clearly others have been just as impressed with that video as I was. That one video alone has triggered a wave of discussions. I suspect that's because it provides a line-of-sight to what network operations might look like in the future. That line-of-sight includes: You can…

26/05/2023 No Comments

I’ve just been blown away by a really revolutionary demonstration

Over the last year, I’ve been assisting a consortium that includes a number of iconic brands such as Intel, RedHat, Fortinet, Keysight and TechMahindra. More importantly, those elements are underpinned by a powerful closed-loop engine formed by EnterpriseWeb and KX that stands up, observes and optimises a 5G RAN testbed. You can view the test-bed in action here - https://networkbuilders.intel.com/university/webcasts/extreme-automation-at-the-network-edge As you’ll see in the video…

23/05/2023 No Comments

An AR/VR product I’d love to develop. What are your thoughts?

As some of you will have spotted in past articles, I've spent the last couple of years working with solutions at the intersection of OSS/BSS (data) and AR/VR for visualisations and new ways of working. A couple of animated GIFs from that work are shown below. An interactive 3D model with assets identified from OSS / inventory data. An AR projection of a tower onto…

19/05/2023 No Comments

Crossing the Chasm: How to avoid flip-flopping between OSS products and services models

Are you familiar with Geoffrey Moore's famous, "Crossing the Chasm" concept from his book of the same name? It basically describes the large gap between early adoption of a product and getting it to mainstream utilisation. With the large amount of fragmentation in the OSS/BSS market, there are clearly many products that haven't been able to leap across to widespread utilisation yet. But that's not what…