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OSS Sandpit – GPON Network Inventory Prototype

This article provides a tutorial for building GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) components into the inventory module of our Personal OSS Sandpit Project. It's also a model for FTTH / FTTP (Fibre to the Home, Fibre to the Premises) as well. This prototype build includes components such as: Passive Optical Network (cables, patch panels, splices, splitters, containment, multiports, other splice joints) Active GPON equipment (OLT, ONT) This GPON…

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17/11/2020 No Comments

Industry News: TTG implements for Turkcell

Breaking news: "TTG implements for Turkcell" has been published on our Industry News stream. Industry News includes: contract wins, new product releases, job openings, EOIs/RFPs, etc. To publish news about your organisation, first claim or register your organisation’s listing on The Blue Book OSS/BSS Supplier Directory then create a news post.

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10/11/2020 No Comments

OSS Sandpit – Fixed Wireless Network Inventory Prototype

This article provides a tutorial for building Fixed Wireless (FW) Network components into the inventory module of our Personal OSS Sandpit Project. This prototype build includes components such as: A fixed wireless core network Radio Links across licensed and unlicensed (5 GHz and 24GHz) Line of Sight analysis of each Radio Link and Viewshed Fibre links (including cable management) Tower Management Routing and Switching Layer 2 and Layer…

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10/11/2020 No Comments

OSS Sandpit – Smart City / IoT Network Inventory Prototype

This article provides an example of building Smart City and IoT (Internet of Things) Network components into the inventory module of our Personal OSS Sandpit Project. This prototype build includes components such as: A Command and Control Centre (CCC) Satellite Earth Stations Smart Buildings including: Compute / Hosting (VxBlocks) Comms (incl Unified Comms and In-Building Coverage) Security (eg CCTV, Access Control) Building Management Systems (BMS) Public Address /…

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05/11/2020 No Comments

OSS Sandpit – Satellite Network Inventory Prototype

This article provides an example of building Satellite Network components into the inventory module of our Personal OSS Sandpit Project. This prototype build includes components such as: A Satellite Earth Stations Satellite Aggregation Site Beams (including Beam to Earth Station mappings) Customer services Satellite Dishes Satellite Receivers (ODU / IDU) Satellite Modems Leased Lines (backhaul) Our prototype is summarised in the diagram below: We describe this via the…

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02/11/2020 No Comments

Root Cause by Hierarchy (RCH)

The challenging thing about establishing root-cause is that the rules tend to be fairly unique to each network. Each vendors, topologies, interface specs, etc tend to be quite different, so they need to be customised to each network. But there are a few rules that can be applied to any network. Yesterday we described a root-cause algorithm called Root Cause Trace (RCT). Today we'll look at…

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30/10/2020 No Comments

Root-Cause Trace (RCT)

Since we're on the train of root-cause this week (see the 4 RCA proximity techniques article), I thought I'd share a root-cause technique that relies on topology proximity. It's referred to as Root Cause Trace (RCT). Many of our networks (eg access networks like FTTx, mobile, HFC, etc) are tree or bus in nature, whether that's in the physical, logical or virtual / hierarchical sense. As…

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29/10/2020 No Comments

Proximity and Root-Cause

When it comes to identifying root-cause (ie to identify the actual thing that's broken / degraded rather than the all of the other things that are affected downstream), I tend to think of proximities / adjacencies: Proximity in topology (ie nearest neighbours) Proximity by geography Proximity in time (temporal proximity and seasonality) Proximity by object hierarchy (think OSI stack, particularly for cross-domain entities) Proximity by context…

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27/10/2020 1 Comment

OSS Information Overload, Underload

Our OSS/BSS collect a lot of information. But how much of it is used and in what ways? How do the users find the information they need to make decisions? In some cases, our OSS completely overload the user with information. An example might be in performance metrics. Our network might have hundreds of nodes and each node is collecting dozens/hundreds of performance data points every…

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26/10/2020 No Comments

OSS Sandpit – 5G Network Inventory Prototype

5G networks seem to be the big investment trend in telco at the moment. It comes with a lot of tech innovation such as network slicing and an increased use of virtualised network functions (VNFs). This article provides an example of building 5G Network components into the inventory module of our Personal OSS Sandpit Project. This prototype build includes components such as: Hosting infrastructure NFVI /…

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16/10/2020 No Comments

OSS Sandpit – Resource / Inventory Module

This article provides a description of the inventory baseline, one module of our Personal OSS Sandpit Project. As outlined in the diagram below, this incorporates the Inventory solution (by Kuwaiba), the graph database that underpins it as well as its APIs and data query tools. The greyed out sections are to be described in separate articles. We've tackled inventory first as this provides the base data…

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15/10/2020 No Comments

Building a Personal OSS Sandpit

Being Passionate About OSS, I've used this blog / site to share this passion with the OSS community. The aim is to evangelise and make operational support tools even more impactful than they already are. But there's a big stumbling block - the barrier to entry into the OSS industry is huge. The barrier manifests in the following ways: Opportunities - due to the breadth of…

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14/10/2020 2 Comments

Industry News: Vodafone NZ signs with Comarch

Breaking news: "Vodafone NZ signs with Comarch" has been published on our Industry News stream. Industry News includes: contract wins, new product releases, job openings, EOIs/RFPs, etc. To publish news about your organisation, first claim or register your organisation’s listing on The Blue Book OSS/BSS Supplier Directory then create a news post.

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01/10/2020 No Comments

Industry News: Microsoft and Telstra to partner on cloud, IoT, and digital twins

Breaking news: "Microsoft and Telstra to partner on cloud, IoT, and digital twins" has been published on our Industry News stream. Industry News includes: contract wins, new product releases, job openings, EOIs/RFPs, etc. To publish news about your organisation, first claim or register your organisation’s listing on The Blue Book OSS/BSS Supplier Directory then create a news post.

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30/09/2020 No Comments

Industry News: First to use SpaceX’s Starlink internet in the field: ‘It’s amazing’

Breaking news: "First to use SpaceX’s Starlink internet in the field: ‘It’s amazing’" has been published on our Industry News stream. Industry News includes: contract wins, new product releases, job openings, EOIs/RFPs, etc. To publish news about your organisation, first claim or register your organisation’s listing on The Blue Book OSS/BSS Supplier Directory then create a news post.

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30/09/2020 No Comments

OSS/BSS in the Clouds, updated again

We posted an article in July entitled "OSS / BSS in the clouds," which looked at the OSS, BSS and related telco infrastructure platforms being offered by AWS, Google, Microsoft and their partners. This followed a number of recent announcements made by the hyperscalers relating to their bigger pushes into telco. It had a particular focus on 5G models and the edge compute technologies that support…

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30/09/2020 No Comments

OSS/BSS in the clouds, updated

We posted an article in July entitled "OSS / BSS in the clouds," which looked at the OSS, BSS and related telco infrastructure platforms being offered by AWS, Google, Microsoft and their partners. This followed a number of recent announcements made by the hyperscalers relating to their bigger pushes into telco. It had a particular focus on 5G models and the edge compute technologies that support…

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10/09/2020 No Comments

Is omni-channel more disadvantage than advantage for telcos?

In our post on Monday, we discussed how some commodity providers have a structural advantage through lower cost of production (eg Rio Tinto in iron ore). Telcos have the potential to achieve a similar advantage on their commodity services too. It also mentioned that the first principle behind that advantage is simplicity (of systems, overheads, processes, offerings, etc). Many of these simplification factors are controllable by…

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09/09/2020 No Comments

Is scaled OSS/BSS multi-tenancy a thing?

We talked yesterday about the commoditisation of telco services and the part that OSS/BSS have to play in differentiation. We also talked about telcos retaining a few competitive advantages despite the share-of-wallet inroads made by OTT, software and cloud service providers recently. Managed services is one area where some of those advantages converge. Quite a few years ago I worked with one of Australia's largest telcos…

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08/09/2020 No Comments

OSS’s Influence on Cost of Production

Since widespread deregulation of telecommunications globally, the passing of data has become a commodity. Perhaps it always was, but increased competition has steadily driven down dollar per bit. It's likely to continue on that path too. Meanwhile the expected throughputs and consumption of data services is ramping ever-upwards, which requires investment in networks by their operators. By definition, a commodity is a product/service that is indistinguishable…

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07/09/2020 No Comments

How fragmentation is harming the OSS/BSS industry

Our Blue Book OSS/BSS Vendors Directory provides a list of over 400 vendors. That clearly states that it's a highly fragmented market. This amount of fragmentation hurts the industry in many ways, including: Duplication - Let's say 100 of the 400 vendors offer alarm / fault management capabilities. That means there are 100 teams duplicating effort in creating similar functionality. Isn't that re-inventing the wheel, again…

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04/09/2020 No Comments