Cable BSS/OSS: The Easy Part’s Over

Running a cable back office used to be easy. You’d figure out what services a subscriber bought, correlate that, send out a bill and go golfing. It didn’t matter if the sub bought voice, video, data or any one of those three services; the price didn’t vary. The only reason to even keep track of what was going on — and there are those subscribers who maintain no one ever did even that — was to maintain a quality signal.

Those days are over. The cable companies have not yet stepped fully into the overly complex world of mobility billing where minutes count for data, voice and texting and everything has to be correlated and attached to a bill that’s sometimes bundled with wireline services. But the cable bill is no longer cut and paste.

Calculations, developed from back office systems, are becoming mind boggling as cable is “taking a household-oriented business and trying to turn it into an individual-oriented business,” said Tim Vari, CIO and senior vice president of IT for Rogers Communications. “There are so many things going on at once.”

Vari was speaking during an OSS/BSS panel at The NCTA’s Cable Show in Washington, D.C. last week where IT-oriented executives outlined the challenges they face as their companies increasingly compete for more telecom market share by delivering more interactive services. It was, to an extent, the how-to handbook for other topics at the show, not the least of which were cable’s wireless play and new interactive targeted advertising efforts.

Cable is getting into the wireless business either as part of the new Clearwire WiMAX offering, as a standalone mobile play à la Cox Communications and Rogers, or as a Wi-Fi hotspot-on-demand offering such as the one Cablevision is spending $300 million to roll out.

“We will eventually have wireless and wireline convergence,” Vari said, where the back office will share commonality at the OSS layer and migrate the BSS for both businesses onto a common platform. At the same time, the operator must make certain that a customer wants the services mash-up on the end bill because “there’s a difference between telling the customer or asking the customer how he wants the relationship managed,” he said.

Cable is consolidating its front-end or subscriber-based network to deliver more convergent services to fewer in-home devices, mashing together the cable modem, the set-top box, the telephone and even television. That front-end consolidation is causing problems for the back end because “when you tie more systems together, you have to look at what happens when they go down,” said Cliff Hagan, senior vice president of Enterprise IT for Cablevision Systems.