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

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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