Telecom industry trends

When you've been in the telco industry for many years, you'll begin to notice that OSS/BSS trends often move like a pendulum. The pendulum moves from off-the-shelf products to in-house-developed and back to off-the-shelf. From monolithic to modular and back. The current trend is to move away from monolithic stacks to microservices. Large telcos have fostered modularity for many years by using best-of-breed approaches. They are now increasingly adopting microservices, which represent modularity, but at a micro scale.

 

OSS on cloud

An increasing number of telcos are sending out RFPs for public cloud OSS, but that hasn’t caught Suntech off guard. Our entire SunVizion OSS suite is proven to work smoothly on AWS, giving CIOs much-needed peace of mind.

Migrating vital OSS applications to the public cloud is no longer unthinkable, at least for the more pragmatic telco CIO.

Future of telecommunications

End-to-end service orchestration and automation needs proper OSS tools and fit‑for-purpose network inventory. 

Ambitious network operators do not want business as usual. They want to transform their operations and become much more agile. This not only means swifter time-to-market for new services, but also lower total cost of ownership (TCO). In pursuit of digital transformation of this sort, many operators talk about turning themselves into a “software telco”.

What is Open RAN?

The open RAN promise of greater cost-efficiencies will be broken without a fit-for-purpose OSS/BSS. If the back office can’t keep pace, telcos will struggle to take full advantage of network advances.

Open RAN is picking up industry momentum. Big telco beasts, including Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Vodafone, are urging suppliers to adhere to ‘open’ principles in the radio access network (RAN), where software is disaggregated from general purpose processing hardware.

Fiber optic planning

5G needs a RAN overhaul, pumped up with more fiber. Cost-efficient network planning is then required if the business case is not to be derailed. 5G network operators need to pay close attention to fiber. If the next-gen tech is to deliver on its promise of greater capacity, faster speeds and lower latency, more fiber-optic cable is needed in the radio access network (RAN). There’s no other way to handle increased data volumes and provide a future-proof solution. According to some estimates, internet traffic is growing tenfold every five years.

Networks during pandemic

The right network planning tools can help operators meet bandwidth challenges posed by the coronavirus outbreak. COVID-19 has thrown the spotlight on networks and connectivity. Home working, distance learning and videoconferencing –  the popularity of Google’s Zoom app has soared – is the new normal. People need reliable broadband more than ever. Without it, a global recession is much more likely.

OSS digital transformation

Back-office refurbishment is just as important as network advances if telcos are serious about OSS digital transformation.

A lurking danger for telcos is that network transformation outpaces operations support systems (OSS). Given network innovation enjoys a much higher profile than back-office refits, perhaps it’s understandable that OSSs tend not to command as much attention in the boardroom as SDN, NFV, 5G and Internet of Things (IoT).