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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

A new revenue line just waiting for OSS/BSS to grab

I'm assuming that if you're reading this blog, chances are you're already an OSS/BSS expert, or spend a lot of your working life thinking about them. Perhaps you do more than think about them and actually help to implement them in some way. Perhaps you don't implement them yet, but have been tasked with understanding them in more detail. During those activities do you spend much…

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03/09/2020 No Comments

How to Design Telecommunication Business Process Flows Using eTOM

Introduction to eTOM Have you been tasked with designing process flows for a telecommunication network operator or setting up a business process management regime? Do these include end-to-end (E2E) processes that leverage one (or likely more) of your OSS/BSS tools along the journey? Perhaps you’ve even been tasked with setting a roadmap for OSS/BSS development and/or integration with other OSS/BSS (Operational Support Systems / Business Support…

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06/08/2020 No Comments

Bollinger bands and candlestick charts in OSS

No doubt all of you have seen network performance graphs. The one below is an example (from Flowmon 8.03). This example shows throughput, jitter and round-trip time amongst other metrics. No doubt you use many additional metrics to track the health of your network. Most performance management tools show the range of metrics as line or bar graphs, as above, which is helpful of course. They…

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21/07/2020 No Comments

OSS / BSS in the clouds

Have you noticed the recent up-tick in headlines around telco offerings by hyperscalers AWS, Google and Microsoft? Or the multi-cloud telco models, the middleware, supplied by VMware and Red Hat? Whilst previous generations of wireless connectivity have focussed on voice and data capabilities, 5G is architected to better enable consumer business models. Edge compute (both on-prem / device-edge and provider edge) and related services to support…

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20/07/2020 1 Comment

OSS/BSS Testing – The importance of test data

Today's is the third part in a series about OSS/BSS testing (part 1, part 2). Many people think about OSS/BSS testing in terms of application functionality and non-functional requirements. They also think about entry criteria / pre-requisites such as the environments, application builds / releases, test case development and maybe even the integrations required. However, an often overlooked aspect of OSS/BSS functionality testing is the  data…

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25/03/2020 No Comments

OSS/BSS Testing – Transitions

One of the most vital, but underestimated aspect of OSS/BSS project implementation is ensuring momentum is maintained. These large and complex projects are prone to stagnating at different stages, which can introduce pressure onto the implementation team. As mentioned in yesterday's post, the first in this week's series, the test strategy and scheduling is regularly overlooked as a means of maintaining OSS project momentum. More specifically,…

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24/03/2020 No Comments

OSS/BSS Testing – the V-Model

On major software projects like the OSS you’re building, testing is an important phase of course. You’ll have undoubtedly incorporated testing into your planning. After all, testing is a key component of any Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). There are various SDLC models / methodologies such as Waterfall, V-Model, Agile and others that you can consider. Unfortunately, most OSS project teams tend to underestimate the testing…

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23/03/2020 No Comments

Getting confused by key Assurance metrics?

Are you a bit slow like me and sometimes have to stop and think to differentiate your key assurance metrics like your MTTRs from your MTBFs? If so, I thought this useful diagram from researchgate.net might help The metrics are: MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) - the average elapsed time between failures of a system, service or device. It's the basic measure of availability / reliability…

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17/03/2020 No Comments

The common data store trend (part 2)

Last month we posted an article that described using a common data model (CDM) for our OSS / BSS data. It mostly looked at the situation within the context of typical operational data sources (the blue boxes on the left side of the diagram below): Today's article pushes the vision a little further. If your CDM is built as part of an enterprise-wide data warehouse, then…

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16/03/2020 No Comments