Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in our September Special Edition, Behind the Scenes, a focus on integrated subscriber and network management systems. To download the complete Special Edition, click here.
Wireless operators have customers, offer services, source from suppliers, engage with partners, develop products, bring them to market and hopefully turn a profit. Wireless operators are just like any other communications business, or are they?
Like every other communications service provider (CSP) business, a wireless operator has to develop products. The products need to be cost, priced and introduced to the market. The market needs to be sold on the products. The products need to get to the consumer and sometimes back again when problems need to be solved. The operator will have a myriad of supplier and partner interactions.
Operators will have an HR department and employees who need to be paid. Customers need to be billed and payments from customers need to be processed. Shareholders need to be satisfied that the business is being run optimally.
Of course, these are the similarities. In a few other ways, wireless is indeed special. The technology is unique, and the capabilities that wireless technologies deliver create new market opportunities and in turn create some truly unique challenges in operating and maintaining the set of networks and services managed by the OSS/BSS systems.
Once upon a time and not that long ago, phones were fixed to a wall in one room of your house. In our house, it was a cold room to discourage long expensive calls and a public passageway to discourage intimate discussions – another neat trick to control the bill! Now we have devices that can communicate with each other – with or without our direct involvement. The traditional telephone is only a small aspect of the communications that take place today. The change is dramatic and at the center of that change is wireless.
So it is with OSS/BSS for wireless. There are special challenges in running a wireless network. Planning and optimizing a network with a dynamic and mobile user base is one such challenge. Roaming is unique to wireless, and also unique is the phenomenon known as bill shock – it cost how much to download my e-mails while I was in Dubai? I don’t know where my landline operator resides, but my mobile operator has retail outlets in every small town. That’s a whole different model for customer interaction. It is these mobile-based challenges that define what is different for a wireless operator vs. a fixed operator.
It is bringing together the combination of the things that are the same and the things that are different so that wireless operators can manage their networks, customers and services in an integrated fashion that is the power of TM Forum best practices and standards.
Network technology developments that impact OSS
Wireless is seeing some significant developments at the moment. What I like to call the LTE flavor of 4G is not just making mobile broadband faster and more responsive; it is also bringing some new challenges for OSS suppliers. LTE brings the concept of self-organizing networks (SON) and a flat all-IP network architecture providing new challenges and opportunities for OSS suppliers. SONs will require new policy-based OSS software capabilities to realize their full potential – and these advanced OSS features have yet to make it to market.
WiMAX has emerged as a fixed-mobile offering that is being sold in many markets as the provider of rural broadband and a viable alternative to land services that are expensive and slow to roll out. Through home routers and a network of hotspots, WiMAX provides a different, less continuous type of mobility through wireless.
As technology moves to all-IP, networks become flatter and operators take the opportunities to streamline their operations in line with their architecture. All-IP networks also herald the blurring of the traditional split between the “network guys” and the “IT team,” and technology changes enable transformation in the OSS layer.
Industry trends
There are some interesting industry trends these days, from the headline grabbing “iPhone phenomenon” to more subtle changes in consumer behavior.
At the operator level, one trend being observed is wireless and wireline network and service convergence. There are fewer and fewer suppliers of simple mobile or fixed-line services. It is common for operators to offer triple- and quad-play service bundles comprising wireless, digital TV, home broadband, home phone and hotspot access on a single bill. As these converged service offerings mature and get more complex, they will create new demands on OSS/BSS capabilities such as service creation, customer relationship management and billing capabilities. They also drive the need for the operator to have a true end-to-end picture of the network. How does the network perform across all my platforms? How can I perform policy management across all the technologies that comprise my network? How can I ensure seamless customer experience regardless of the means my customers use to access the network?
The range and mix of devices is also changing. Where previously a consumer had one or two discrete devices that would access the network by different means and to carry out different tasks – a mobile phone for voice and SMS and some limited WAP browsing and a wireless card on a laptop for data-heavy access – the new generation of smart phones is taking mobile-data usage to a new level. Depending on what age you feel, you may not even use your phone for any voice calls – well except when your old-fashioned parents actually call you rather than follow you on Facebook.
New devices are getting added to the list of wireless-enabled communications devices – smart meters being a great example. I never quite got the concept of remotely checking my fridge to see if I need milk but I do get the idea of asking my house to warm up on a cold day. I can really see the advantages of scaling that concept up to more general management of large public buildings. All these devices need to be monitored, managed and maintained, and if you do need to go shopping you will need an app to query your fridge. The complexity of managing the network grows very quickly in devices all accessing the mobile network.
As devices, technology and consumers mature so too does the market. As the all-IP world becomes a reality for wireless technologies, new competitors from outside the traditional communications sphere have emerged. Witness the rise of the Apple App Store and the growing success of Google Inc.’s Android operating system. This competitive environment will make the customer experience even more critical for the success of the wireless operator.
Trends in OSS and BSS
The OSS space is changing also with a greater focus on services than ever before. Four of the five hot topics in OSS are all about service.
Service convergence describes the new wave of digital services that involves players from a good number of previously discrete industries. An end user may enjoy a service which has involved players like Sky, Google, insurance companies, health service providers, Time Warner Cable, and eBay Inc., as well as Nokia Corp., Microsoft Corp. and telecommunication companies.
The explosion of multi-platform digital drives business from the single supplier model toward a distributed value network. Operators have to work with new business partners and are challenged to more effectively develop, monetize and manage new products and services involving many third parties. Significant levels of integration of processes across value chains are required and there is a consequent need to reduce the cost of de
livering services across value chains and involving mu
ltiple parties.
Customers are demanding end-to-end service level agreements at the level of distributed applications, rather than at the level of network throughput. OSS functions like capacity management, problem resolution, and fulfillment all need to be reinvented for a world where customers demand seamless service to operate across business boundaries.
The Service Oriented Enterprise is a modular organization, where process, information, systems, and people are bundled to provide reusable business services with which the enterprise operates. Operators are transforming their business from network focused to service focused organizations using SOA to redefine their OSS architecture (Service Oriented Architecture – defined as computer systems architectural style for creating and using business processes packaged as services) and the TM Forum Business Process Framework (eTOM) to redefine their operational processes to align with this new service-centric world.
No business exists without its customers, and a major aspect of OSS and BSS is the management of customer experience. With broadband all the way to the handset in 4G networks, a new set of customer experience challenges will arise. To truly “manage” the customer experience, service providers have to understand what defines their customers. This means building a complete picture of customers including the preferences, behaviors, personas and social network affiliations that define the customer. In a market where the service provider doesn’t even know the billing address of its large proportion of prepay customers, this is a huge challenge.
The TM Forum Frameworx integrated business architecture addresses all the OSS hot topics. Frameworx delivers an industry agreed, service-oriented approach for rationalizing operational IT, processes and systems. Frameworx consists of a common process architecture for both business and functional processes – the Business Process Framework (eTOM); a common reference model used to describe management information – The Information Framework (SID); a common language to describe systems and their functions – the Application Framework (TAM) and a service oriented integration approach with standardized interfaces and support tools – the Integration Framework.
Frameworx and its components are widely adopted across all kinds of service providers – wireless, wireline, cable, and defense to name a few. It is the ability of Frameworx to enable creation of a flexible, easy to change OSS/BSS environment that makes it so important to the next generation of all IP networks. With the level of complexity across the devices, services, networks and IT environments, everyone needs a way forward that does not involve starting from scratch and that does not mean custom integration work every time a new partner joins the value chain.
Conclusion
Wireless markets are seeing subscriber growth slowing as market penetration for mobile devices exceeds 100% in many markets. ARPU is on the decline, and the return on investment on infrastructure to support data growth is under threat. Three key focus areas for operators are to reduce the cost of operating their networks, reduce subscriber churn by improving their customer experience and introduce innovative new services while reducing launch times for those services.
Some of these areas are new to the wireless industry but well-seasoned challenges in other sectors of the communication industry. There is nothing special about wireless – lucky for wireless – because of the wealth of OSS/BSS expertise in the industry that is available to address all of these challenges and those yet to come.
Marie Murphy is the Director of the Managing New Technologies Initiative at TM Forum. With more than 20 years of experience in the mobile Industry, Marie has worked in Europe, Asia and the U.S. in a variety of roles with one common theme – mobile operations.
