Top carriers demand new OSS standard

The world's biggest carriers are pushing urgently for an obscure new standard which can enable interoperability between OSSes.

Under pressure from the operators, the TeleManagement Forum will begin rolling out the standard, known as Prosspero, in the next few months.

Jon Collins, a forum board member and vice president of Telcordia Europe, said Prosspero was critical to enable different operators' OSS and BSS to talk to each other to support next-gen services.
 
"This interoperability and interconnectivity is a really vital thing going forward," he said. "It means the different OSS that underpin the operators'  services have a much easier way to plug and play."

He said the rolling out of services such as IPTV, with many different network, OSS, content and device elements involved, meant the industry was looking for standard ways of ensuring service.

"If the IPTV user experience is terrible and the user wants a credit for the movie they just downloaded, there's going to be a whole bunch of finger-pointing in the middle of the food chain if they don't figure out how to get the standards right," he said. "If they don't get it right, the whole thing is going to be a mess."

Collins said BT, AT&T and other major carriers met with the TMF board a month ago and called for Prosspero to start being delivered as soon  as possible.

He said over the next few months a small set of standards would be rolled out and adopted by the tier-one carriers. These were aimed at becoming the core to solve some of these problems of the future.