In an increasingly wireless world, the wireless ubiquity we all demand calls for an untethered approach to next-generation operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS). Given that wireless is where much of the growth is in today's communications markets, at first blush it may seem like a goldmine for any OSS/BSS provider with a pulse.
Yet just as 'I want to be in pictures' Hollywood-bound types have created a steady stream of restaurant waiters and tour guides in the greater Los Angeles area, companies that set off to take the wireless market by storm without a focused idea of where the opportunities are can find themselves reduced to bit players or dying of contract starvation.
Here's a quick guide to two areas where next-generation OSS/BSS providers are making a living by helping in-demand wireless services take flight.
User- and service-specific global service monitoring, testing and measurement
Far more often than wireless operators and wireless users want to admit, wireless service today is largely a 'best effort' affair. Users are still so enamored of the ability to communicate wirelessly that they are remarkably forgiving of dropped calls, noise and sizable dead zones even in major metropolitan areas.
Too many actual users find themselves emulating the well-known character from television commercials who keeps saying, 'Can you hear me now?' If we are to advance the state of the art in the wireless world, we must get beyond the finger-pointing between those involved in the wireless supply chain and 'in-service' network dashboard generalities, to quantify and report on the actual user experience.
A branch of the next-generation OSS/BSS market is emerging to do precisely that, with software that enables wireless operators to pinpoint sources of downtime, isolate the performance of each component in the end-to-end mobile infrastructure, and monitor advanced services like push-to-talk or applications like rich media streaming. Operators can even benchmark their own performance versus that of other operators. Products employ interactive testing and monitoring of wireless content, applications and services using both real and software-emulated mobile devices to provide user-specific testing across services that include email, IM, streaming video, SMS, MMS, WAP, push-to-talk, over-the-air (OTA) transactions, and Java/BREW applications.
As a result, wireless operators can ensure consistent quality of service (QoS) for subscribers and users. Perhaps someday the big question will no longer be whether the other caller can hear us, but: 'How many years has it been since we disconnected our last wireline phone?'