Operations support system
Systems used to manage telecommunication networks
Operations support systems (OSS), operational support systems in British usage, or Operation System (OpS) in NTT are computer systems used by telecommunications service providers to manage their networks (e.g., telephone networks). They support management functions such as network inventory, service provisioning, network configuration and fault management.
Network inventory typically includes both physical assets, such as routers, switches, fiber-optic links and base stations, and logical resources such as IP addresses, VLANs and virtual circuits. Maintaining an accurate and up-to-date inventory is considered essential for provisioning new services, troubleshooting network issues, and planning capacity. Industry research highlights that communication service providers are modernizing inventory platforms to support automation, analytics, and integration with OSS/BSS systems.
Together with business support systems (BSS), operations support systems support various end-to-end telecommunication services. BSS and OSS have their own data and service responsibilities. The two systems together are often abbreviated OSS/BSS, BSS/OSS or simply B/OSS.
The acronym OSS is also used in a singular form to refer to all the Operations Support Systems viewed as a whole system.
Different subdivisions of OSS have been proposed by the TM Forum, industrial research labs, or OSS vendors. In general, an OSS covers at least the following five functions:
Network management systems
Service delivery
Service fulfillment, including the network inventory, activation and provisioning
Service assurance
Customer care
History
Before about 1970, many OSS activities were performed by manual administrative processes.
“Operations support system” enters the record as systems used to manage telecommunication networks. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Operations, support and system can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Operations support system” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.