Next Generation B/OSS Critical To China's Telecom Operator Success

With the expected completion of China's telecom restructuring, telecom operators will have entered the full services era. 2008 will be a watershed year where China's telecom operators will transition into a modern information services industry. And pre-commercials trials and field testing of TD-SCMA marks the new stage of 3G.

CCID Consulting expects B/OSS will play a more important role in future telecom operations. In 1H08, China's B/OSS market reached 4.53 billion Yuan, and is expected to reach 7.68 billion Yuan by year-end 2008.

Each of China's three restructured telecom operators have had long-term investments in B/OSS to provide improved support capabilities, and to form operational support systems particular to the operators' business requirements, flow, and network architectures. A number of B/OSS vendors, who understand both fixed and mobile networks, are competing in billing, network management, operations analysis, accounting, and other areas.

Telecom Operator	Operations and Management (O&M) Profile	O&M Implementation Status
China Mobile	Enhancing and promoting centralized O&M at province level; Moving towards headquarter level.	Emphasis on integrated network management at headquarter level; TD-BOSS and B/OSS 3.0 implementation mainstream in 2008; Substantial NGOSS planning.
China Telecom	Network O&M at city-region level; Multiple networks coexist with legacy equipment and complex interfaces; Centralized to province level.	Local comprehensive network management mainstream; Strong technical staff can develop B/OSS in-house; In 2007, bought 3rd party software and hardware for MBOSS.
China Unicom	Network O&M at city-region level; Part centralization to province level.	Headquarters control all province-level projects; Building networks and comprehensive network management simultaneously.

Currently, China's telecom operators' B/OSS systems are either fixed-line or mobile network oriented. This will present challenges, particularly in billing systems, when operator's go to full services mode.

For traditionally fixed-line operators, their B/OSS systems do not support pre- and post-paid mobile billing. Future full services systems will require integration of such billing systems and cross platform management.

For traditionally mobile operators, their current billing systems do not support broadband and fixed-line billing. For the move to full services, initial focus should be on customer information relocation and integration, taking care to preserve the integrity and uniqueness of such data.

Business customers will demand more to measure the quality of service they receive. Service level agreements (SLAs) require quantification of key metrics such as service availability; and fault response, repair, and recovery time averages.

Future B/OSS will not only need to delivery such data, but also to integrate various systems to deliver business, customer, and network management functions and analytics.

Convergence of fixed-line, mobile, Internet, VoIP, and other functions put even more integrated demands on B/OSS.

China's telecom restructuring lays a firm foundation to realize these opportunities, and will demand integration in the various network layers and protocols. B/OSS will need to support such integration with uniform management of different services and systems.

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Unless otherwise specified, all information provided is sourced from CCID Consulting.