NBN Co plans to build its own OSS/BSS

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 15 March 2011 16:09

Business IT - Networking

After initially saying it would like to pick a single vendor to supply the operational support system/business support system (OSS/BSS) for the National Broadband Network NBN Co says it does not believe it can buy what it needs and intends to build its own system.

NBN Co CEO, Mike Quigley told the Huawei-sponsored Asialink forum in Melbourne last week: "I would have liked to have been able to pick up an OSS/BSS from somewhere else around the world but we are having to build that largely from the ground up and that is quite an undertaking."

He explained "We are going to try and make this network very visible and transparent to our customers - the retail service providers and other wholesale service providers - so they can, via a B2B portal, look into the network and see the performance of the network on an end to end basis."

He added that a further complication was that "We are supporting multiple services in the premise'¦ [the ONT] has four ethernet ports which means the end customer can have services coming from multiple service providers."

Quigley's claim of the need for a bespoke OSS/BSS was greeted with some scepticism. One OSS expert suggested that this was unnecessary. "In my humble opinion they are burdened by having way too many engineers who are trying to double guess everything and are trying to come up with the all-singing, all-dancing answer to everything even before the question has been asked," he told ExchangeDaily.

"They have decided to design their own architecture for the underlying OSS because they wanted to simplify how it is done but they have actually complicated things." He said that this made it very difficult for any OSS vendor to provide an adequate response. "When they ask vendors 'what have you done before?' nobody has the answer. And there has to be something wrong with that, because it is a simple network."

It is likely that all the major multinational OSS vendors would be vying for business from NBN Co. Also local company, Clarity, has a number of substantial OSS contracts with major overseas telcos and has made clear its intent to bid for the business.

Alcatel-Lucent, the main supplier of NBN Co's FTTH network equipment, is also likely to be in the running. Within a few months of the announcement of the NBN in its current form in April 2009, Alcatel Lucent had produced a white paper 'National Broadband Network Providing the Systems Capability for Open Access, billing "a contribution to the discussion around the proposed fibre to the premise (FTTP) National Broadband Network." It dealt primarily with what Alcatel-Lucent thought the NBN OSS/BSS should do.

CONTINUED