Three of the world’s largest telecoms equipment vendors – Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) – have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to for the “OSS interoperability initiative” (OSSii). The alliance is aimed at reducing time-to-market and lowering the costs of implementing new operations support systems.
The three “initiating parties” – a term which suggests that the alliance could be joined by other equipment vendors – will cross-license their OSS interfaces to allow greater up-front interoperability for service providers operating across multi-vendor networks.
These cross-licensing agreements must be bilateral under the terms of the MoU, and extend to “fault, performance, configuration and basic network event and trace management for the northbound interfaces from radio access, circuit core and packet core network management systems”. Third-party OSS vendors will also benefit from cross-licensing and interoperability tests upon joining the OSSii.
Huawei’s OSS & wireless networks president Jiang Wangcheng stated that the OSSii would “provide operators in all markets the ability to fully capitalise on the best OSS solutions available”.
Thomas Norén, vice president and head of product area radio at Ericsson, added that the initiative would “cut cost for our customers” while “stimulat[ing] innovation in network management”.
Peter Patomella, head of OSS business at NSN, said: “The OSS marketplace is a patchwork of standards and proprietary interfaces that are controlled by the IPR owners. With cross-licence agreements, we want to help operators take full advantage of the best available products in our industry.”
