By Cassandra Millhouse, Product Marketing Director – Amdocs OSS Division
It’s one thing keeping your customers happy by providing high-speed connectivity with new technologies like Ethernet, but how do you, as a service provider, guarantee benefit from the investment your business has made? Or, put another way, how exactly can you guarantee and increase revenues, and avoid becoming an ultrafast, but dumb, pipe?
One method is to apply Class of Service (CoS) management to Ethernet service, such as mobile backhaul, so this valuable resource can be differentiated, controlled and regulated according to your rules – applying your rules allows you to protect and increase your revenues.
Put OSS at the center of your Ethernet strategy
The only way to successfully manage this and differentiate your Ethernet service is by adopting a closed-loop planning and fulfillment Operational Support System (OSS). The OSS in this case focuses on the CoS within the network at the point when it is designed and built.
Meeting the key challenges
We have identified six ways an OSS can help to meet the challenge:
Inbuilt Class of Service planning and design capability – design the required Service Level Agreement (SLA) and not negatively impact existing SLAs
Admission Control – Admission Control in the OSS controls the decision as to whether a particular service is possible against defined rules.
Holistic approach to plan, build and provision process – Service Decomposition, Resource Management, Activation and Synchronization must support multiple vendor equipment, and integrate seamlessly with Business Support Systems (BSS).
One service design across multiple technologies – The OSS must seamlessly work with mixed multi-technology service placement.
Managing and offering differentiated services – Policing capacity requires a 360° view of systems and data and sharing of data across groups is essential.
Right size and plan– Manufacturing and retail industries have demonstrated that being able to right size and plan the supply chain is critical to being successful and profitable. This same transformation is now happening in the telecommunication sector.
You can read more about this approach to OSS by downloading the full article at http://www.osstransformation.com/CarrierEthernet.aspx.