Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Telecom OSS BSS An Overview
Telecom OSS BSS An Overview
1. Introduction
Before the initial 1970s, most of the support activities in a telephone
company such as taking orders, maintaining network inventory, provisioning
services (for example, line assignment and testing), configuring network
components, managing faults and collecting payments were performed
manually. It was realized that many of these activities could be replaced by
computers. In the next few years, a number of computer systems and
software applications were created to automate these activities. Examples
include TIRKS, RMAS, SES, etc. Thus came the term Operations Support
Systems (OSS).
OSS are network systems dealing with the communications network and
supporting processes such as maintaining network inventory, provisioning
services, configuring network components, managing faults.
Business Support Systems (BSS) is a newer term and typically refers to
business systems dealing with customers and support processes such as
taking orders, processing bills, collecting payments, sales and marketing,
supporting customer care agents in response to service requests, trouble
reporting and billing inquiries, etc.
OSS and BSS systems together are often abbreviated as BSS/OSS or B/OSS.
The term OSS was historically used to include both network and business
systems. Some industry analysts, system integrators and service providers
still use the term OSS to include both network and business systems, which
sometimes causes confusion.
This article provides an overview of some of the core areas in OSS and BSS
such as Order Fulfillment, Service Assurance and Billing systems. The
following BSS/OSS systems are covered:
The article explains some of the basic functions of these systems. However,
this article doesn't intend to provide extensive details. For an extensive
overview of business activities, business process and functions, refer to
standards such as eTOM and TAM at http://www.tmforum.org/.
After order entry, validation and submission, orders are decomposed and
sent for provisioning. Upon fulfilling the decomposed orders and appropriate
testing of the circuits, the orders are put into inventory. The following subsections explain the Order Fulfillment related functions and OSS/BSS
systems.
2.1.1 Order Management
Order Management systems are complex systems that allow customer or
customer service representatives to capture and process new orders, modify
existing orders, process customer moves and changes, price quotes and
orders, validate orders, etc., while supporting multiple channels such as
Web, Order template documents and partner applications as well as multiple
lines of businesses.
Order Management includes the following areas:
One of the major problems service providers often grapple with is that, as
new services are added to the offerings, led by different business units, the
lack of flexible order management platform results in product/service
specific OSS/BSS applications. These in turn result in higher time-to-market
as well as increased costs of maintaining many different applications and
systems. Product catalog based Order Management solutions attempt to
solve these problems by storing and processing qualification rules for
services based on customer profiles, ordering channels, service locations,
product interdependencies, availability, customer eligibility and other
business constraints.
2.1.2 Service Provisioning
Service Provisioning systems are systems used to setup products/services
for the customer after an order for the services has been created and
accepted by the CSP.
Some service providers may run network discovery routines on a daily basis
to discover any unauthorized changes to the network topology as a result of
security intrusions or unplanned insertion of devices.
Moreover, network elements and computer systems have a variety of
version information associated with them. For example, a workstation may
have: Operation System, version 32, Ethernet Interface, version 5.4, TCP/IP
Software, version 2.0 and SNMP Software, version 3.1. Since multiple
engineers/network operators work on making changes to the network
equipment, tracking the changes manually would be very tedious and errorprone. Configuration Management tools help automates the tracking of the
changes. Configuration Management systems store the configurations in a
database or LDAP server for easy access.
They also enable network operators to change configurations of the network
elements as well as to roll back a change to a previous configuration, if
required.
When a problem in the network occurs, network operators often search the
Configuration Management database for clues that can help solve the
problem.
2.2.4. Planning & Testing
Network Planning solutions help determine when a communication network
needs an upgrade or additional equipment as well as to predict the impact of
changes to a service providers networks topology, configuration, traffic and
technology. They provide simulation tools that help the network operators to
project how growth in network traffic will affect the network performance.
Based on the results and other planning activities, network operators can
take countermeasures such as increase capacity.
remote locations.
2.3 Billing
IDC [6] defines Billing as: the processing and compiling of charges and
enabling of revenue collection for network usage, feature transactions, and
access charges of the services.Mediation systems collect network usage data
from the network elements and convert to billable statistics.
The following figure depicts a simple Billing flow:
Traditionally, for phone calls, Call Detail Records (CDR) have been used to
record the details of the circuit-switched phone call. CDR includes
information on start time of call, end time of call, duration of call, originating
and termination numbers. CDRs are stored until a billing cycle runs. For IP
Based Services, a new standard is gaining acceptance called Internet
Protocol Detail Record (IPDR). IPDR supports both voice and data.
Billing systems use mediation output to determine charges for the
customers. It is also used to feed other downstream applications such as
Fraud and Churn Management.
2.3.2 Rating
Rating systems calculate the charge for an individual call, IP usage event,
etc. using the CDRs/IPDRs. Rating systems apply charges based on preconfigured pricing rules, applicable discounts and rebates from promotions.
This rating process has grown increasingly complex in recent years. In older
times, it was solely a matter of taking the length of the call, assigning a
price based on the mileage band (calculated by cross-referencing the prefix
of the originating and terminating numbers in a table of values), and
assigning discounts based on the time of day (peak, evening, night), day of
the week, and holidays.
Modern rating systems can assign discounts based on calling circles, provide
flexible rating plans based on size of accounts and increase switching costs
[2]. These serve as strategic marketing tools but can be very complex to
administer and operate.
2.3.3 Billing Systems
Billing systems aggregate rated calls, IP/data usage events, etc. and
calculate customer invoices. In the United States, billing is usually performed
once a month.
Billing systems combine rated records with prior balance information,
payment records, recurring charges (such as line rentals), one-time fees
(such as installation and service charges), promotions and discounts
associated with the customer account, taxes and credits. Overnight billing
batch jobs are among the largest batch environment at a CSPs operating
environment. Each customer is assigned a specific billing cycle.
According to Insight [2], the holy grails of the billing industry are unified
billing and convergent billing. With unified billing, a customer gets a single
bill for all services provided (or billed) by the service provider, appropriately
rated, discounted, and taxed, and a single contact for inquiries and
negotiation.
2.3.4. Interconnection Billing
In the competitive world of communications, service providers often tie-up
with partners, in order to bundle their own products with their partners. This
helps the service providers to provide attractive bundles of products and
services. However, in order to successfully settle interconnect billing
settlements an effective Interconnection Billing is required.
Interconnection Billing products support inter-working of a service providers
billing systems with the corresponding systems of another service provider,
based on interconnect agreements and contracts.
2.3.5. Revenue Assurance
Revenue Assurance & Fraud Management systems verify billing, detect and
identify unauthorized usage of service provider network assets. Some of the
kinds of frauds are Usage and Subscription.
Usage Fraud means that a customer uses the telecommunications network
illegally. This is accomplished either by obtaining a service with no intent to
pay or by obtaining unauthorized access to the network (i.e. hacking or
cracking).
Fraud Management systems typically detect and prevent unauthorized
access to a communications network by analyzing traffic patterns on the
network. Some examples are provided in [8]:
3. Conclusion
3.1 Summary
OSS/BSS systems and applications automate many of the day to day
operations performed in a communications service providers operating
environment. They optimize the time taken to perform these operations and
make the business processes more efficient.
There are no all-encompassing OSS/BSS systems that can be installed,
integrated, tested and allow the service providers to easily modernize their
end-to-end operations functions.
Service providers, therefore, use all the different approaches: best-of-breed
in some areas, off-the-shelf in some, and home-grown custom applications
in the remaining areas, to modernize and optimize their operations.
More often than not, many of these OSS/BSS systems are integrated with
the others in a point-to-point fashion, as part of discrete projects and
programs, sponsored out of different business units. This leads to point-topoint integration of OSS/BSS systems unless the programs/projects are
planned with a strategic goal.
A side effect of the difficulty in integrating the various OSS/BSS systems is
many of the OSS/BSS systems in a service providers operating environment
may not be integrated at all. For example, it is not unusual to find the
following scenario: when a customer orders a new telephone line, the
ordering system takes the details of a customers order, but a manual
process is present to configure the telephone exchange using a switch
management system. Details of the order entered in the Order Handling
system is re-keyed manually by the technician into the Switch Management
System a process often referred to as Swivel-Chair Integration.
The article provided an overview of some of the core OSS/BSS areas in
Order Fulfillment, Service Assurance and Billing.