Telecom OSS/BSS Systems to Capitalize 5G Opportunities for Next Level Growth

The telecom industry is on the verge of a major transition and we can’t deny that 5G is playing a vital role in this. It is the new age technology that is enabling various modern use cases like remote surgery, autonomous vehicles, smart city, private networks and Industry 4.0.

Soon 5G deployments will be everywhere and it will cover 40% of the world by 2024 while handling 25% of all mobile traffic data. Thus, the CSPs are also realising the need to transform their business and operations systems in order to enhance their digital engagement with the consumers and also to monetize their network investments.

5G Enabled Transformation is Necessary To Monetize

5G enabling has brought up an anticipated surge in advanced technologies like AI (Artificial Intelligence), IoT (Internet of Things), AR/VR and many more. This has made it even more difficult for the CSPs to fulfil the demands of their customers and support the new business model. Hence, change is necessary in order to keep up with the exceptional latency, better speed and high-quality service of 5G. Multiple hi-tech use cases in both enterprise and consumer markets are enabled with 5G, but for that, the telecom operators are required to collaborate with partners that can help provide for industry-specific use cases.

Role of Partner Ecosystems in the 5G Monetization

As per the recent TM Forum’s report, about 72% of 5G revenue growth would depend upon the OSS/BSS transformation. Thus, modernization of OSS and BSS is essential to become a Digital Service Provider that can react instantly to meet the growing needs of the consumers. The traditional OSS/BSS systems aren’t capable enough to fulfil all the needs of the DSPs including ordering, billing, orchestration, billing and device management. An OSS/BSS solution, like the one offered by Echelon Edge, can help is meeting the evolving demands of new-age TSPs. Doesn’t matter at what stage they are on the digital transformation journey, Echelon Edge’s BSS solution can help the telcos in reaching the top of evolution.

Key things to consider for OSS/BSS Transformation that can enhance opportunities for 5G Monetization

• Analysing business for identifying the solid and repeatable processes. Although cloud solutions are very much capable, if the current procedures aren’t in working condition, then there’s no use in moving all of them to the cloud.
• Examine the applications and systems that are utilized to implement those procedures and trade-off the costs and benefits of a cloud approach. With cloud technology comes expected costs with less maintenance and development, nonetheless, a strong business case is still required for every conversion or migration. You need to consider that traditional OSS/BSS can’t be replaced by the cloud version overnight and things are going to take time, thus it’s necessary to plan and prioritize for parallel operations.
• Standardizing the scale is one of the most difficult parts of technology deployment. The goal is not only to design cloud solutions that can grow bigger but can also scale from end to end. The issue is that just adding capacity can’t be called scaling and this will only move the bottlenecks from one part of an operation to another.
• Work with providers that follow standards. The lessons that were extracted from the last technology evolution must be applied to the cloud transformation too. Companies offering cloud services must avoid closed solutions and opt for open standard platforms and interfaces.
• Support for integration. The businesses must address that any virtual, physical, network, cloud and IT component might be needed to be integrated with another at some point of time. Corporate standards must be enforced in order to incorporate interoperability in demand for proposals.
• More focus on the security factor. In order to reduce the cost and time-to-market, sometimes the cloud vendor doesn’t pay enough attention to the security, then the damage caused by security breach will be felt by the operator and not the provider.

The fact is that communication service providers need a technologically advanced platform that can serve both retail and enterprise customers from the initial phase of discovery and acquisition to onboarding, gaining actionable insights and self-care.

As a telecom service provider, you might be having several new revenue opportunities that can aid you in moving ahead from typical voice and data offerings. But you need to find the one that comes with years of experience in the field that possesses proven expertise in addressing the weak spots of the TSPs.