Nokia Siemens Networks, Ericsson, Huawei sign OSS innovations pact

Telecom Lead India: Telecom equipment vendors — Nokia Siemens Networks, Ericsson and Huawei — signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) enabling the use of OSS innovations across the industry.

To help operators simplify network operations and reduce costs, the three companies have agreed to cross-license the OSS interfaces used for multi-vendor network management.

Thomas Norén, vice president and head of Product Area Radio, Ericsson, said: “As a leader in the OSS industry we are pleased to be part of this initiative that is a practical approach to reducing the hurdles to OSS interoperability. OSSii shows the industry commitment to reducing OSS interoperability costs. It will stimulate innovation in network management, and cut cost for our customers, which is great.

By enabling multi-vendor interoperability up front between the OSS of all three vendors, the OSS Interoperability Initiative (OSSii) will promote competition by simplifying operations, reducing the overall integration costs as well as speeding up the time-to-market of 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.

Peter Patomella, head of operations support systems (OSS) business at Nokia Siemens Networks, said: “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.”

Under the terms of the MoU, the signing parties are committing to bilateral cross licensing agreements for multi-vendor network management.

The cross-licensing and interoperability testing is open for third-party OSS vendors by joining the OSSii.

Jiang Wangcheng, president of Huawei’s OSS & Service Wireless Networks Business Unit, said: “We at Huawei believe the OSSii agreement will greatly forward OSS development, and will provide operators in all markets the ability to fully capitalize on the best OSS solutions available.”

 

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