OSS SPENDING TO PICK UP STEAM

“About 2700 telcos existed before the first wave of deregulation swept the industry in the early 1980s. Last year, 1900 new carriers came into being, and [soon] more than 5000 will be operating. And they all will have to talk with each other. These statistics help explain what's pushing the market for operations support systems (OSSs) into the enviable position of having too much work to do and too few people to make it happen as quickly as clients want.”

Unfortunately, the preceding appeared in Telephony, the sister publication of Wireless Review, in April 1998. Three years into the new millennium, it's a new day for operations and business support system vendors.

Sure, many of them still have too much work to do, but much of that work is reactionary rather than revolutionary. Vendors are busy developing new interfaces, dismantling end-to-end solutions and designing new modular architectures and building to new frameworks, all driven by having to adjust to the moving target of wireless operators' priorities.

On the brighter side, however, wireless has a coolness factor that tethered services — even increasingly popular VoIP — will never match. Mobility tops everything, and those with the patience and ability to stick out the still-slow migration to 3G will be rewarded handsomely.

For now, 99.3% of OSS spending still is in support of basic voice and SMS services according to Insight Research. Overall, wireless OSS spending will grow to $18.92 billion next year, according to Insight, up from $12.4 billion in 2002. And spending for OSS in 2.5G and 3G will outdo the expected service revenue over the next few years, with wireless OSS spending accounting for 6.8% of all global OSS spending, while next-generation services account for only 0.7% of worldwide 2.5G and 3G revenue.

RHK puts global OSS spending by 2007 at $40.5 billion; Insight puts it at $31.8. Either way, after a flat 2003, the numbers start growing at a compound annual growth rate of up to 20.6%.

With so many third-party application developers vying to become part of the third generation wireless explosion, 2004 could be the year that the OSS through Java initiative (a.k.a. OSS/J) gets serious recognition as the leading framework for delivering the solutions mentioned above. OSS/J is a working group of industry leaders, led by Sun Microsystems, that have joined resources to define and implement an open, standard set of Java technology-based APIs that helps remove the barrier of expensive and time-consuming integration of OSS/BSS applications.

So while terrestrial broadband systems may have a temporary bandwidth advantage over wireless networks, the confluence of such mobile characteristics as presence and availability, location services, seamless roaming, streaming video and online gaming will soon become wireless realities. Security and emergency services also will help drive the wireless OSS market. The need will be acute for specialized mediation, collection, billing, quality-of-service, service delivery and rating solutions that help operators introduce all that magic profitably and appease the many third-party providers that will become integral parts of wireless networks.

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