Telco infrastructure players standardise OSS interface

The three biggest infrastructure players, Nokia Siemens Networks, Ericsson and Huawei, this week signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to collaborate with a view to reducing Operations Support Systems (OSS) integration costs for carriers and enabling shorter time-to-market for new services.

The OSS interoperability initiative (OSSii) is designed to facilitate multi-vendor interoperability ‘up front’ between the OSS products of all three vendors, simplifying operations, reducing the overall integration costs as well as speeding up the time it takes to roll out new services.

The reciprocal agreement will cover 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. Under the terms of the agreement, the signing parties are committing to bilateral cross licensing agreements for multi-vendor network management.

Cross-licensing and interoperability testing is also open for other third-party OSS vendors to participate in by joining the OSSii.

“The OSS marketplace is a patchwork of standards and proprietary interfaces that are controlled by the IPR owners. With cross-license agreements, we want to help operators take full advantage of the best available products in our industry,” said Peter Patomella, head of operations support systems (OSS) business at Nokia Siemens Networks. “Openness and fairness have been the guiding principles in the agreement of the OSS Interoperability Initiative.”

The OSSii portal can be found here