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Launch of The Passionate About OSS Podcast

We're excited to announce the Launch of The Passionate About OSS Podcast. The first batch of five episodes can be found here, with new episodes to be released here on a weekly basis: https://passionateaboutoss.com/paoss-podcast/ The aim of the show is to shine a light on the many brilliant people who work in the OSS industry. We'll interview experts in the field of OSS/BSS and telecommunications software.…

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19/01/2021 No Comments

004 – An Analyst’s Perspective on the OSS Industry with James Crawshaw

James Crawshaw is a Principal Analyst with Omdia, one of the world's top-three technology analysis agencies. James specialises in analysis of OSS, telecommunications and IT industries, which means he spends more time researching OSS technologies and firms than almost anyone on the planet. In this episode, James provides insights into what's currently trending in OSS, but he also describes the techniques he uses to peer over…

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18/01/2021 No Comments

003 – Hints on Finding a Role in the OSS/BSS Industry with Michael Jones

Michael Jones is a Practice Principal at Analytica Resources, a recruitment role that sees him connecting employers and employees. Analytica is a niche agency that specialises in BSS and OSS placements. This provides Michael with an insider's perspective on the successful techniques that applicants use to find their first, or next, job in the OSS / BSS industry. Michael describes the processes that he uses to…

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18/01/2021 No Comments

002 – The Importance of Physical Network Inventory (PNI) in an Increasingly Virtualised World with Peter Dart

Peter Dart describes his journey working with some of the world's earliest geospatial software to his current role as Chief Architect with Synchronoss. In this role, he helps to guide the roadmap of Synchronoss' Spatial Suite, a set of tools that assist leading network operators to manage and maintain their Physical Network Inventory (PNI). In a world where network virtualisation technologies are grabbing the attention of…

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18/01/2021 No Comments

001 – From OSS Startup to IPO with Tony Kalcina

Tony Kalcina recounts the story of taking Clarity International from its founding team and customer to IPO (Initial Public Offering) and beyond. He also describes an extensive career starting with Telstra OTC through to his current role as the APAC CTO for Tech Mahindra and Ambassador for TM Forum. Tony provides insights into the formation and leadership of OSS teams and the opportunities that still exist…

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18/01/2021 No Comments

000 – Introduction to The Passionate About OSS Podcast

Welcome to the Passionate About OSS podcast, the show for people who are just that – Passionate About OSS – Where the OSS stands for Operational Support Systems. In other words, the software solutions that help manage and operate the complex telecommunications networks of today. Thanks for joining me on the episode that isn’t quite an episode – it’s more of an introduction message that describes…

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18/01/2021 No Comments

Canary Releases

Do you remember back in the old days of OSS/BSS releases into production? They were a little bit stressful.... especially for the Release Managers. I remember one Release Manager who used to set up the packages, type out the commands, then his hands would be poised above the keyboard, literally shaking. He would then position his finger above the Enter key and look away from the…

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10/12/2020 No Comments

OSS Sandpit – Power, Supervisory and Comms Networks combined in our Inventory Prototype

This article provides a tutorial for building a Power network with corresponding SCADA and comms network into the inventory module of our Personal OSS Sandpit Project. This prototype includes components such as: Power Network including: Wind Turbines (WT) Solar Panels Transformers Circuit Breakers (CB) Substations (Generation, Transmission and Distribution) Transmission Towers Power Poles Smart Meters / AMI Inverters Power cabling, including OPGW (Optical Groundwire, which bundles ground wire…

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30/11/2020 No Comments

OSS Sandpit – Telco Cloud / DC Inventory Prototype

This article provides a tutorial for building Telco Cloud / Data Centre components into the inventory module of our Personal OSS Sandpit Project. This prototype has been a bit of a beast to build and includes components such as: Hosting Services including: IaaS (VMs, storage, network - FlexPod) PaaS (ONTAP-AI a hosted AI solution, hosted voice) SaaS (email, secure keys) Internet ecosystems Cloud provider ecosystems CoLocation / Rack…

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25/11/2020 No Comments

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