Big five start mobile CO-OP at TeleManagement World

Long Beach, Calif.— Five of the largest members of the TeleManagement Forum joined forces this week at the TeleManagement World conference to launch an initiative to develop open standards for mobile network management. The Co-operative Open OSS Project (CO-OP) will be led by Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Nokia and Siemens.

CO-OP members will work together on architecture specification, testing and verification of mobile network management systems (NMS). The goal of the CO-OP is to reduce the complexity of integrating network equipment and management systems from multiple vendors in mobile operator networks.

The initiative advanced the TMF’s "lean operator" concept which provides a framework for achieving more flexible operations, lower operating costs and faster time-to-market. The results will be seen as a practical implementation of the forum’s New Generation Systems and Software framework, according to Keith Willetts, founder and chairman of the TeleManagement Forum.

The companies will work on common OSS system specifications, standardized interfaces for peer-to-peer element management, and common testing and verification practices. As the TM Forum CO-OP Project is defined, it will become easier to integrate OSS elements that offer greater flexibility and stability in a multi-vendor environment.

"The mobile space is one area where people have moved from talking about doing something about solving problems to actually doing something," said Martin Creaner, chief technology officer for TMF.

The work will begin as a TeleManagement Forum project with the goal of driving the implementation of a common system architecture for interoperable network management systems. It could expand beyond the TMF eventually and will present testing and verification procedures and reference implementations based on the agreed standards.

The Project will work closely with other key standardization initiatives such as OSS/J, 3GPP and 3GPP2. It is open to other network equipment providers and will include input from the TMF’s Service Provider Leadership Council. The SPLC consists of major operators such as Vodafone, Orange, BT, NTT and AT&T.