GEORGE MALIM BUSINESS SUPPORT SYSTEMS
BSS FOR FIBRE NETWORKS: EMPOWERING NEW CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES
As a new wave of fibre network providers rolls out fibre capacity, including FTTH, we are seeing providers with different models engage in providing their infrastructure to consumers and other operators. For some, this is wholesale business as usual, but for others, new approaches to business support systems (BSS) are needed to enable retail billing capabilities. George Malim assesses what fibre providers need from BSS.
T raditional telecoms operators addressed BSS initially by building their own solutions operated on mainframes, with great complexity and virtually no flexibility. This was back in the days when telecoms was dominated by state-owned operators. Privatisation and degrees of deregulation ushered in a new era in which operators bought specialised software from BSS vendors. Sometimes these were their network equipment vendors, sometimes they were independent software vendors. The advantage was that operators didn’t have to develop solutions themselves and could access new innovations by signing up to the provider’s never-ending upgrade cycle. The downside remained that customisation cost money every time and the systems still required expensive IT infrastructure in order to operate. Modern fibre network providers don’t want to replicate the complexity of traditional operator BSS. However, their simpler wholesale businesses are becoming more complex and their BSS needs to reflect this. Where once they would wholesale a defined volume of capacity on a fibre link to a retail operator, they now sell capacity
directly, sometimes to consumers, often to enterprises and still to retail operators. Provider profiles range from small, geographically targeted specialists that are bringing fibre to rural regions for the first time to larger, enterprise-focused providers that target large urban centres by building vast capacity. Naturally, the BSS approach for either of these extremes cannot be one- size-fits-all. “It depends on whether the fibre provider is a wholesaler or a retailer,” confirms George Glass, the vice president of architecture and application programme interfaces (APIs) at TM Forum. “If they are a retail communications service provider (CSP), in the BSS they need the full customer information – the name, address, installed
ISP’s details and the products they sell simply carry the identifier of the end customer, which is managed by the retail ISP,” he adds. Others see differences in how fibre networks are being marketed and this has an impact on what will be required of BSS. “The push to have fibre is [based on] the promise of quality to the end user,” says Ragu Masimalany, the global head of solutions at Amdocs. “From a B/OSS perspective, the value is higher speed and lower latency and we’re starting to see operators offering fibre-based broadband tend to position it not as an evolution of copper but as a new product.” “From a business perspective, the model is different even though some operators with cable or copper infrastructure can get really close in theory to the bottom-level of fibre performance,” he adds. “However, there is a clear difference on price for a fibre service. Part of that comes with higher speed but also a tendency to bundle other services such as IPTV which presents a hurdle from a BSS perspective.” Martin Morgan, the vice president of marketing at Openet, sees service proliferation enabled by fibre as the greater challenge than the attributes of fibre infrastructure itself. “As optical networks are capable of delivering a wider range of
products and other information along with the ability to manage product churn. This makes it difficult to get away from having a fully functional BSS.”
GEORGE GLASS VP, APIS, AT TM FORUM
BSS-LITE “If, however, they are a wholesaler of fibre, they can get away with a BSS-lite approach where they hold a relatively small number of
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| ISSUE 20 | Q1 2020
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