Organizations today depend upon their networks to increase productivity and reduce network infrastructure and maintenance costs. Accordingly, these networks must be secure and perform reliably in order to accommodate geographically dispersed users. Unplanned remote site downtime due to equipment failure or adverse environmental conditions can severely impair network service. There is a growing need for diverse network services that are supported with cellular towers, microwave sites, broadband wireless towers and other remote facilities. Business customers are looking to service providers to support their remote computer and telephony rooms with customer premise equipment. In both cases, environmental conditions and power and equipment failures are major causes of unplanned network downtime. IT professionals responsible for providing high availability networks are becoming increasingly aware of the need to protect these vital, yet vulnerable remote sites.
Service Providers are Searching for the Holy Grail - OSS Solutions
Operational support system (OSS) is a generic term used for a suite of programs that enable an enterprise to manage their business systems dealing with customers, supporting processes such as taking orders, processing bills, and collecting payments, as well as monitoring, analyzing and managing network systems. The term originally was applied to communications service providers, referring to a management system that controlled telephone and computer networks. The term has since been applied to the business world in general to mean a system that supports an organization’s network operations. An OSS is critical to bridging front-office applications with back-office efficiencies, customer relationship management, differentiated IP services, rapid service delivery, and scalability. As networks evolve and expand, an OSS becomes essential to the delivery of high-margin services and profitability. The bottom line is customers will select service providers that save them the most time and money, while providing the best performance and customer care.
For many years, the leading telecommunications companies have been looking for interchangeable, interoperable, off-the-shelf business components to quickly integrate into their operations support system (OSS) solutions. These components include service activation, provisioning, quality of service, monitoring and management, billing, trouble ticketing, and other key elements. Carriers worldwide spend more than $50 billion a year on OSS functions, with approximately $4 billion going to network hardware vendors, and $10 billion to independent software providers (ISVs). The remaining balance is spent internally. Yet, nearly half of the $50 billion spent on OSS technology has been for custom-made solutions that were painful to install, not reusable, and expensive to maintain and support.
Managing Customer Premise Equipment
Customer-premises equipment or customer-provided equipment (CPE) refers to any equipment and inside wiring located at a customer’s premises and connected with a carrier’s telecommunication channel(s) at the demarcation point. The demarcation point is a point established in a building or business complex that separates customer equipment from communications company equipment. CPE generally refers to telephones, DSL modems, cable modems, and set-top boxes for use with a service providers’ service; also included are key phone systems and private branch exchanges (PBXs). Excluded from CPE are overvoltage protection equipment and pay telephones.
While the opportunity for managed CPE service growth has great promise, there are many challenges that service providers face. The new and varied technologies implemented at remote sites is usually more than just a traditional PBX voice system, and often exceeds the monitoring capabilities of traditional remote monitoring devices. Immediate and secure access has never been more of a concern, yet many older monitoring devices lack the required security, are too complicated to set up, or report alarm conditions using proprietary communication methods. Furthermore, the demands for high system availability require monitoring and response that go beyond the simple, unintelligent monitoring that has traditionally been available.
Monitoring Remote Equipment Sites
One of the greatest challenges to any service provider is the maintenance of continuous and economical service regardless of weather conditions and power irregularities. Remote equipment sites can include cellular towers, microwave sites, broadband wireless towers, TV and radio towers, and other remote facilities. Equipment in these sites can include a diverse set of devices such as microwave transceivers, cellular transceivers, WiMAX transceivers, broadcast transceivers, routers, servers, power supplies, batteries, generators, and much more. Physical elements can include doors and windows, security equipment such as cameras, temperature, water, fire, chemicals, and many other environmental conditions.
