Is innovationism, not capitalism, driving the decline in telco?

It’s a completely silly question to ask you whether you’ve noticed that the world of OSS is changing rapidly isn’t it? Of course you’ve already noticed that it has and is. Do you already have plans to learn new concepts to help you adapt to those changes in 2023? If so, are you thinking about […]

OSS User Interfaces or User Interactions? GUIs or MUIs?

The cool part of this time of year, the holiday period, is that it prompts you to look backwards and look forwards. To be honest, writing articles here on the blog prompts me to do that throughout the year too, but there does tend to be a bit more downtime for reflection around the boundary […]

The tree analogy – a tale of two eras of telco business models

With the holidays almost upon us in many parts of the world, I thought I’d share an analogy. Like many analogies, it’s a bit oversimplified. It’s also possibly a bit inflammatory in some circles. Hopefully though, it gives a different frame of reference for how the telco business model has changed over the years. More […]

A seismic shift is happening

A seismic shift is happening that will change the world of OSS/BSS so fundamentally in the next few years that it totally blows my mind. It will be the biggest in my 20+ year career in the telco industry. The following pic is from an IA Summit Keynote by Charles Lamanna, the Corporate VP of […]

There’s no competition for OSS cookbooks making food out of soccer balls

Seth Godin recently wrote a brilliant article that describes the craziness of seeking a market with no competition. In entirety, his article goes like this: “There’s no competition for cookbooks on making food out of soccer balls and hockey pucks. There’s no competition for software that charges you to find out the temperature on Mars. There’s no […]

Exciting week for augmented ways of working in telco

Last week was kind of exciting (and a bit manic!). As well as working on a tech due-diligence (DD) and an important client OSS/BSS roadmap, I had the chance to witness some important steps in the progression on telco Augmented Reality (AR) use-cases. On the software side, we already have many exciting use-cases lining up […]

Drawing parallels between Cloud Native, Cloud Enabled and Data Native, Data Enabled

Just sharing a playful analogy to end the week (and month). Like me, you’ve probably heard lots of conversations that contrast cloud-enabled applications with cloud-native. We’ve heard the arguments that an OSS or BSS application might be “on the cloud,” but not really the gold-standard “cloud-native.” We know there are lots of legacy OSS / […]

Upcoming “Inventory of the Future” webinar

Earlier in the year, Omdia commissioned Passionate About OSS to write a report about the future of network inventory. Not just how the tools themselves are changing, but how they might be used, the new ways of working that will be centred around them, how migration strategies are changing and much more. Now in conjunction […]

Passive devices don’t ping…. Or do they?

As we all know, data quality can be a big problem for OSS, at almost every operator around the world. A lot of this problem stems from the fact that most telcos have a lot of passive infrastructure / objects in their networks. Passive devices don’t tend to have programmatic interfaces that allows for current […]

New OSS Innovation Video Recording

The \#Adtran #FibreBroadband Symposium was held in Melbourne on 3rd August 2022. This video link below shows the presentation we made at the conference: It’s designed specifically for network builders, to show the relevance that OSS and BSS have for their worlds. It also shows a very high level view of OSS past, present and future – […]

How AI and blast radii could inspire next-gen OSS designs

Artificial Intelligence is purported to be the panacea for so many high-volume factors within telco. For example, AI is being used for complex pattern recognition using diverse signal streams like churn reduction. AIOps solutions are making great strides to reducing noise within alarm / event lists, filtering and automating, to limit the number of decisions […]

Why KPIs, QoS and QoE aren’t good enough. What else must we do

Earlier this week we talked about the data management challenge being solved, for the most part. However, we still have large gaps in the decision support challenge, mostly because we don’t have tools to help us understand the complex “systems / environments” in which decisions need to be made. I thought the graph below might […]

What is the Exciting Next Frontier of OSS Solution Development?

A discussion with an OSS vendor last week reminded me of an article, and a lecture by Mark Zangari that inspired it, which is now nearly 10 years old. It’s worth revisiting because the challenges described are still relevant for OSS today, still not adequately resolved. At the time, Mark described for his audience at SFU […]

Flying COWs and OSS. A game-changer for Capacity Management?

A recent article here talked about re-imagining the planning and design process for telco networks. We’ve also been heavily involved with the use of drones to help deliver new ways of working in the telco industry lately too. With those two concepts still fresh in our memory, this article about flying COWs from AT&T really […]

Re-imagining network planning? New approaches to plan, design & build networks

In a recent article, we posed many ideas about how future OSS solutions might be re-imagined. We looked into how new approaches and technologies like AR (Augmented Reality) might change solutions and ways-of-working in the near future. This article triggered a conversation about next-generation planning systems with a couple of very clever OSS, orchestration and […]

Really interesting OSS cross-over role

I have a few automated job searches set up for OSS roles. Not because I’m looking for a job (just projects), but to keep an eye on what the markets are looking for and what’s trending that I might not be aware of yet. A really interesting role popped up on one of these searches […]

Re-imagining your OSS? Remarkable approaches changing the world of telco

An updated call for innovation in the OSS industry We are currently living through a revolution for the OSS/BSS industry and the customers that we serve. It’s not a question of if we need to innovate, but by how much and in what ways. Change is surrounding us and impacting us in profound ways, triggered […]

How to define a digital twin, digital triplet and reality twin?

The OSS we’ve been building for the last 30+ years aren’t too dissimilar to the digital twins the world is getting all excited by today. I find it really interesting, not just because of the buzz, but because the term “digital twin” seems to mean different things to different people. Having seen what OSS are […]

How valuable can OSS and IOT data be?

When people talk about the value of OSS data, the discussion invariably turns to privacy and some of the unconscionable things already done with our personal data. Off the top of my head, I can’t remember any telcos blatantly misusing the highly privileged information they have access to. This is possibly a double-edged sword. It […]