Enabling tomorrow’s 5G ecosystem services takes bold action today

The world has witnessed the detrimental effects of vacillation and half measures over the last year. Lesson learned: take bold action.

Not to say the future is already written, but the strategic decisions communications service providers (CSPs) have already made over the last couple of years around virtualization, cloud, open source, 5G, automation and industry standards will be fairly determinative of their overall long-term success.

But let us consider the here and now. CSPs do not have to wait for a fully realized future to begin reaping the benefits of their chosen paths. And they cannot thrive in that future without taking the steps today to speed the innovation of new personalized experiences and ensure the proper delivery and monetization of them and the 5G network on which they run.

The actions necessary today are the same as they have been for a decade. The difference is the sense of urgency and the availability of enabling technologies. That primary action is the introduction of agility, which allows CSPs to move proactively toward a digital economy no one can accurately predict.

New business models will arise, no doubt, but how many? New services will be created as well, but by whom and how many partners will it take to deliver them?

As CSPs look to capitalize on their 5G investments by addressing the enterprise space more directly and taking a new vertical industry approach to the market that involves a great deal of customization, they will not have the luxury of retrofitting their support systems for each specialized model that appears. Support systems must adapt automatically to new scenarios. They cannot do so without a rethink of the OSS/BSS architecture.

5G will no doubt drive tremendous change. CSPs need to be in the cab compartment of the train leading the way to ensure they are the party monetizing this new generation of network technology. In a series of blogs over the last several months we have looked at some of the elements necessary for getting the most out of 5G investment:

• The importance of agility


• Customer centricity and personalization


• The omnichannel experience


• Rethinking monetization


• Fulfillment and dynamic orchestration

These elements all coalesce around the same purpose: driving maximum revenue from 5G. Revenue was hardly maximized with the rollout of 4G and operators can’t afford that to happen again. In fact, it was others—over-the-top providers, content companies and cloud providers—that derived the most new revenue from 4G. If driving revenue is the end game, which it should be, it can only be done by fully committing to comprehensive change in the structure of OSS/BSS.

The graphic below shows that revenue growth, agility and innovation continue to grow as primary drivers of transformation.

With agility as the key enabler, CSPs need real-time charging systems that support any pricing model and feed real-time, multi-party revenue management systems that in turn support new types of partners. These partners can be third-party developers, enterprise co-creation partners, OTT providers, edge computing partners or other platform providers. Controlling the flow of revenue, the fulfillment of the service and the digital experience itself keeps CSPs in charge of the customer relationship and at the heart of the value chain.

Any rethink of the OSS/BSS stack must include the creation of new solutions and the enablement of old systems to be automated, cloud-native, standards aligned and open to third parties. Above all, these systems must be interoperable. Old systems that cannot be brought into alignment with these principles have to go.

TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and Open API programs are being designed to work together to do both: make interoperability simple with Open APIs and providing an open, plug-and-play environment in which partners can create solutions that support whatever the digital economy can come up with.

• ODA is a blueprint for modular, cloud-based, open digital platforms that can be orchestrated using AI. ODA replaces traditional operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) with a new approach to building software for the telecoms industry, opening a market for standardized, cloud-native software components, and enabling communication service providers and suppliers to invest in IT for new and differentiated services instead of maintenance and integration.


• The Open APIs program is a global initiative to enable end-to-end seamless connectivity, interoperability and portability across complex ecosystem-based services. More than 50 REST-based Open APIs have ben developed my TM Forum member companies.

The ODA supports the creation and operation of digital marketplaces that allow CSPs to access and offer capabilities supplied by vendors’ ODA-compliant components via Open APIs as well as offer their own capabilities to third parties to access via Open APIs. Oracle’s Digital Experience for Communications (DX4C) platform provides an example of how to enable 5G services through ODA-compliant solutions from concept to cash and ultimately to customer care. More detail on this can be found in the 2020 TM Forum report, Attaining agility and beating disruptors at their own game.

Oracle also leveraged TM Forum assets and its DX4C platform to demonstrate how a 5G-enabled ecosystem can deliver immersive virtual reality experiences co-created with partners and monetized through B2B2X business models.

Attaining agility, being proactive and leveraging data to develop and offer personalize services in real time has proved quite difficult even in the historically closed environment of the CSP. Now that CSPs will be attempting to achieve this while supporting multi-sided business models, the challenge grows harder—unless they act boldly today to rethink and commit to comprehensive change in their OSS/BSS architecture.