The telecom OSS has been the latest trend in the growth of the telecommunications field in general. Over the years, ISPs have gone from increasing the number of customers to increasing their network capacity, to more recently delivering greater bandwidth to their customers. All along they have had to create and destroy network architectures. The present day telecom network is a medley of various generations of technologies and services. The OSS systems are very useful in managing these myriad solutions.

OSS systems are typically support systems that ensure the network is up and running. They ensure that customers are not left stranded without service and if they lose service, corrective action can be taken quickly. As the networks get more complex and more varied, the true benefits of OSS solutions become more and more evident.

There are many kinds of Telecom OSS solutions available in the market. The most common and probably the oldest solutions are the Element Management Systems (EMS) and the Network Management Systems (NMS). These systems perform the same function but at different scales. Typically, all the equipment in the network is called network elements and the OSS system managing them is the EMS. If the network is heterogeneous, i.e., consisting of products from multiple vendors and using different technologies, the OSS system managing it becomes an NMS.

The NMS/ EMS systems are basically remote management systems that can monitor and configure network elements from a remote location. This provides the ISP with the ability to centralize the monitoring operations and get big costs savings. Through remote operations, most of the errors in the network can be detected to the extent that the exact cause and area of fault can be pinpointed. This means the service technician doesn’t spend time locating the problem.

Besides these management systems, the newer versions of OSS solutions comprise other aspects like Customer Management Systems, Business Management systems, Inventory Management system, etc. All these are newer additions that have come about to make the business more agile and mobile to changing customer demands.

With the fast expanding networks, inventory management has become a key challenge for many operators. There are two aspects to this problem: for one the inventory details are important for planning and expansion – the ISP would never want to run out of capacity after committing a client service. Secondly, this inventory needs to be accurate. Inaccurate inventory can lead to incorrect service design and hence delayed service delivery.

The next phase of telecom billing software would be becoming versatile to handle any technology, any solution and any network deployment situation. This is critical as all ISPs are now pushing for triple play solutions to attract customers and retain them. In such an environment, the OSS systems need to be equally strong to allow the ISP to deliver these services in a timely fashion.

Finally, it can be summarized that going forward, ISPs will increasingly start relying on Telecom OSS solutions to remain flexible and agile to market demands. The triple play solutions would be the next challenge and going forward there may be many more areas of operations optimization that ISPs would require. Dependable and scalable Telecom Billing Solution solutions are going to be in high demand.