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The telecommunications market space has seen a lot of changes from the simple telephone days to the present day triple play solutions. While the initial phase of telecom landscape was defined by getting in more bandwidth in the network, followed by providing bigger pipes to consumer, the present day challenge is being more agile and quicker to react to market needs and demands. The VOIP billing system is key in these new rules of the land.

OSS stands for Operational Support Systems and as the name suggests it is for supporting the network operations. Even ISP has invested a lot of money in installing a resource base to provide high bandwidth solution to the customers and in more recent times also provide wireless services. With growing network size and complexity, managing and supporting it is becoming a tough challenge. OSS systems can help tackle this challenge.

Telecom OSS solutions of the modern day have mainly evolved around the demands of ISPs to remain agile to market demands. The first challenge in the ISP growth is to manage the thousands of network elements that have been deployed. This is the reason why the first OSS solutions were Element Management Systems (EMS) and Network Management Systems (NMS). The EMS solutions tend to be vendor specific and manage solutions from just one vendor. The NMS are broader and can manage elements from various vendors.

The NMS/EMS solutions provide several management functions that are vital for any ISP. These range from configuration solutions to alarm reporting and other control features. What these NMS/EMS systems have done is that they have allowed ISPs to start monitoring and troubleshooting the network problems remotely from a central location rather than from field. This gives a lot of cost savings and reduced troubleshooting cycles.

Besides these management systems, the newer versions of OSS solutions comprise other aspects like Customer Management Systems, Business Management systems, Inventory Management system, etc. All these are newer additions that have come about to make the business more agile and mobile to changing customer demands.

Inventory management is probably the most important addition to OSS functions in recent times. With lot of planning and upgrading going on, keeping track of inventory is absolutely essential. The inventory needs to be maintained to ensure that existing customer do not get cut off mistakenly or new customers are left without service due to insufficient resources. OSS can help address both these problems.

While in the earlier part of the article we have looked as different aspects of the network, the way forward for OSS systems would be integration of different networks and topologies running different technology. With ISPs moving towards triple play solutions, the BSS/OSS telecom billing solution need to evolve to support these triple play deployments. All the EMS/ NMS, Customer / Business Management Systems, et al, need to adapt to this heterogeneous solution.

In conclusion, telecom billing software is key to the modern day service providers. They add agility and flexibility to the ISP operations. They have been growing and evolving to adapt to the changing market demands to maintain the ISP competitiveness. Going forward, stable and versatile telecom billing software could become the defining factor of any ISPs services.