Telecomm network service management

This is going to be a heavy one :-)

As telecomm network technology grows, the amount of complexities in systems and subsystems involved grows also. This may not be such a big deal if we are still focusing our attention at the network level. Only, we don't have that privilege anymore.

Telecomm subscribers has also growth and changed, the people learned to demand more, in quality and quantity of services they have. The word "subscriber" itself is a bit ambiguous nowadays, because it could point not only to people but also to other businesses, or even to other networks or equipments.

So, operators started to think about the problems from the Service point of view. By taking the view up one level it helps them to think more clearly about the problem at hand. But this also brought in another layer of complexities. In Network point of view, a problem may be located and fixed in just a node in a subsystem. In Service pov, things get alot more complex, service problems may be caused by several points in the network, in different subsystems.

The growth of network complexities and the ever demanding customers need to be taken cared of in a smarter way. When not so long ago we can limit telecomm services as just Voice services and may easily identify and fix a problem in the service, currently we talk about different kind of services with different requirements and different parts of network.

When in PSTN we only talked about Switchings and leased circuits, then in GSM we had increased complexity of MSCs, VLRs, HLRs, BSCs, BTSs, VAS, etc, and now in 3G we have more interesting things (Node-B, RNCs, new interfaces, etc) to play with and the trends will keep went up in the next years in the next generation networks.

Funnily, errr or is it sadly..??, I notice that network designers/engineers seems to be unnotified or ignorant about this issue, they keep designing and engineers "new-and-better" networks with extended complexities in each new release and still (atleast seems to me) putting this service quality issue behind.

In service quality management world, OSS (should) played much more important role than before, and people has seems to acknowledge about this, equipment vendors have started to think about this, third-party consultants started to said alot of things, some have also started to present "solutions" to help overcome this problem.

Note that it's almost always a "solutions" not a ready system/product. That's because this is still an area with most complexities, usually people tend to stay away from this kind of issue when they can. Some operators has started projects to handle the situation, some manage to get good results (or so I've been told), some are still striving to get it done.

Personally, I think that a "network and service quality management" solution is close to impossible to be implemented correctly. There simply not enough budgets and resources for this in many operators. But I still think that there are many un-explored ways to solve the problem.

... to be continued ...