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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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 /…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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.
Read More »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.
Read More »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.
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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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