Five nines is a catch-cry in the telco industry. There’s a view that we should measure the up-time of all the devices in our network and they should all reach the gold standard of 99.999% (ie downtime is less than five and a half minutes per year).
But how many times have you seen an ops team quoting their five nines KPIs, whereas the users are complaining about the unreliability of a service? Put simply, they use five nines to measure up-time of boxes, not measure a customer journey that traverses many boxes, networks, OSS, BSS, etc.
The way to measure the real customer experience is to establish synthetic transactions that mimic the user’s journey through various use-cases (eg a service activation, a change of service configuration, a service / configuration / billing enquiry, etc). These synthetic transactions must have a way of traversing all of the elements that make up the service.
In some cases, such as when flow-through provisioning is established, then it’s as simple as firing a transaction at your test platform (eg Google’s Postman) and observing the results against established benchmarks. In other cases, they’re not easy to set up, particularly if an operator’s OSS and BSS have manual, swivel-chairing activities in any of the user journeys. In these cases, the test harness becomes more complex, as does the chaining of transactions to mimic a customer service.
You might want to consider how this functionality performs within an environment where you have chaos monkeys running around causing havoc within your infrastructure.
Making your OSS easy to use isn’t about adding more “easyness” – it’s about subtracting what sucks. “To make your stuff “easier to use” you
During my first forays into OSS, over a period of 6+ years, I averaged 85 hours a week whilst being paid for a 40 hour
The call came in at 5:43am. “The routers are acting up again down at 1313 Packetloss Lane” the night supervisor whispered, as if afraid the
Telco appears to be an increasingly tough industry. Demand for connectivity continues to soar, yet profitability and differentiation are becoming ever more difficult to achieve.
Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
