“Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections.”
Malcolm Forbes.
OSS have an important role to play when it comes to creating the trends and projections from aggregated data.
Put simply:
- if the projections underestimate real network growth then congestion will be high, as will customer dissatisfaction.
- if the projections overestimate real network growth then overcapitalisation will occur by building out network capacity that is not yet justified
- accurate recognition of trends allow for a greater margin of safety in the projections made
Irrespective of the information provided by the OSS, capacity planning is still an art-form as it takes into account many variables that the OSS doesn’t track, such as project on-boarding, regulatory changes, market shifts and many others. Perhaps the advanced analytics of the next generation will make projections even more reliable based on a broader set of inputs.