'Operators are starting to monitor and measure the service to a degree that has never been done before'

What do you think are the key trends in the OSS space?

The biggest trend is that we are moving from network assurance to service
assurance and further more to customer experience. Customer experience is
becoming more important than acquisition of customers. The simplicity of old
network is becoming complex. Simple service of voice is quickly becoming triple
play and quad play. Generally the move is towards IP. We are also seeing a move
from best effort service to guaranteed SLAs.

Tell us about Agilent's OSS business.

The way we got into this business was, by taking a test and measuring and
distributing the testers around the whole of the network, which is automatically
monitored about what is going on in the network. The big breakthrough came about
12 years ago when we took the protocol tester and distributed it to look at the
signaling network (SS7 network). By doing that you can monitor all the calls
actively and enhance call detail record to do network assurance, service
assurance, interoperability, and fraud detection. Today our product, Access 7
monitors about 60% of the total worldwide phone calls.

The passive monitoring system has become the basis of our
OSS business. It is interesting that the complexity of simplicity has increased
dramatically in the last four years. In the SS7 world, if someone calls from
Mumbai to Delhi, it will take about five signaling messages to set up the call.
When you switch on your GSM phone today it takes about 25 messages to wake up
the phone. If you have a GPRS phone, it will take about 50 messages just to wake
up the phone, before you make any call.

If it is a SIP based push to talk call, it will generate a
thousand messages in the network to set up the call. From five in the SS7 world,
thousand in push to talk, there has been a lot of complexity in signaling in the
last four years. That is a huge issue because there is a lot of information
embedded in signaling and you have to monitor this 24x7. What is happening in
the market today has been there for the last 100 years, the operator have been
obsessed about the network making sure that the network is solid.

What changes you have seen in the last 5 years in terms
of telecom services?

From the last five years, there has been a shift towards service assurance,
which is what guarantees the revenue. Operators are starting to monitor and
measure the service to a degree that has never been done before.

Tell us about your new Wireless Quality Manager (WQM).

We have recently launched WQM, a lot of which has been developed at
Agilent's R&D team in India. The WQM is a new generation of active call
testers. It takes a very complex environment and simplifies the testing. In that
environment today, the only way to test is to do it manually, by having lots of
people to make calls. We can help service providers reduce this active testing
time. So if you have got a number of networks in different countries-say for
25 different services, and user provides, it will take about 90000 tests. We
believe that in the current scenario that will take about 95 days to do it
manually. With WQM, we can do that in 45 hours, which is an order of magnitude.
In terms of people count, to do it manually all the time, it will take about 150
people. It is possible to get this done by a robotic system. This is a great
improvement over the previous generation product and is easier to use, more
robust, and can be installed quickly.

What are the issues, which you think is important from
India's point of view?

In India coverage is still a challenge. The rollout takes a lot of time and
it takes a lot of time to test. As of day, the commissioning of an MSC takes on
an average of five days and involves about 80 persons. Operators can easily
bring that down to 10 hours. Also in terms of roaming, which is big revenue
generation service for the service providers; operators can easily streamline
their roaming arrangement with implementation of suitable roaming management
solution, which can help them. 

Sudesh Prasad

sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in