National Network Operation Center for Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation

     Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation (ETC) is a state-owned, fast-growing operator with expansions on the backbone and access networks. Currently, ETC is moving toward the implementation of its Next Generation Network (NGN). Besides the Government’s initiative, this move to NGN is motivated by the need to support new market demands, as well as the need to exploit the synergies that new technologies enable.
However, ETC has to consider three basic elements for its move: the new IP networks and IP-based multimedia services; the necessary changes to meet the customer demands; and Operational Support System (OSS) for ordering and billing processes.

     Due to various technical and financial reasons, the move to NGN and the associated order/billing processes are progressing with a slow pace. Therefore, there is an urgent need to look for
cost-saving and revenue-generating opportunities afforded by the redevelopment and transformation of the OSS. A study conducted two years ago by an external consulting firm also suggested ETC to improve its network operations and management practice, and recommended it to implement an integrated centralized network management system to cope with present and future needs.

     OSS, as well as the associated processes transformation, is critical to lowering the costs of delivering existing services, improving revenue, depreciation and amortization, and improving the flexibility of ETC’s businesses to deliver new services and grow revenues.

     The benefits of an OSS transformation are twofold. First, it delivers cost savings and operational effectiveness improvements in running the existing business; second, it delivers the necessary systems, infrastructure and process to enable a smooth, cost-effective transition to NGN.

     Consequently, ETC needs to undertake an urgent review of its current network management practice and look to initiate an OSS transformation in the very near future, thus generating immediate cost savings while positioning itself for NGN and the advent of IP Multimedia System (IMS) services.

1 ETC’s Challenges
Currently, ETC is managing its networks in a technology-focused manner. This has resulted in increased number of separate management systems that specialized in managing different segments/technologies of the infrastructure: GSM radio network, GSM core network, Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), Edge, IT/application, third-party, and more.

     Typically, the responsibility for each segment falls under different operations groups that have their own processes (often archaic and manual), and some tools in place help them achieve the day-to-day network management and operation tasks within their sphere. The development of technology has greatly increased the number of operation and management systems in ETC’s networks, while the introduction of new services (frequently on separate, dedicated platforms) only exacerbated the problem.

     Some important observations include:

• Distributed Operations and Maintenance Centers (DOMC) and lines-of-businesses have resulted in overwhelming number of different Element Management Systems (EMS);
• The trouble-management process is often split across networks and customer-facing teams, and is manually intensive, lacking process automation rigor;
• There is higher percentage of unplanned/corrective maintenance versus planned;
• Outages are not tied to
  customer/service impacts, and therefore it is not possible to estimate revenue loss;
• Current solutions monitoring the network are not scalable or
  cost-effective;
• Non-integrated network testing and diagnose functions did not properly cover end-to-end service monitoring and user experience;
• High IT costs and long turn-around times are required to support newer technologies and network elements;
• The management of suppliers, including network equipment providers and Independent Software Vendors
  (ISVs ), is ineffective;
• It is unable to develop a strong business case to justify OSS transformation costs.
  

     Therefore, for managing multiple networks across different lines of business and geographies, operational systems have become highly complex. This complexity manifests itself generally as a large number of independent technology-focused EMS, highly distributed data, and poor end-to-end process integration.
The outcome is sub-optimal efficiency driven by low data accuracy, high maintenance costs, manual process management and poor collaboration, and integration among the different functional units. The financial impact is low asset utilization, reduced cash flow from longer times to complete orders, reduced revenue from lower service quality, and higher costs of planned and unplanned outage and maintenance.

     Deploying new networks may include the near-future transition to All-IP, and new services put increasing pressure on the operational support systems by increasing this complexity. Therefore, in order to support the drive to new revenue and streamlined network operation and maintenance, the envisioned OSS must be much more flexible than current network management and operation practice.

2 ETC’s Need of NNOC
In order to cope with the fast growth in the complexity of networks, services and also their customer base, ETC has realized the need of a centralized National Network Operation Center (NNOC) that can improve the network performance and lower the time needed to locate and maintain faults. Furthermore, it is able to ensure customers experience service quality and perceive the value of delivered service, and it also improves operational readiness for short time-to-market of new innovative services. The basis for the NNOC demand is a centralized resource management system, which will also contribute to a comfortable and efficient network planning.

     Besides the current demand on an NNOC, ETC also envisions that it has to be prepared for competition on a feasible liberalization of the telecommunication market in the future, as well as on certain re-organization of the Strategic Business Units (SBUs).

     To cope with this challenge at present and in future, the most flexible arrangements of the NNOC structure itself shall be taken into account.

3 ZTE’s NNOC Solution
Committed to its customers’ satisfaction and reducing Operating Expenditure (OPEX) in customers’ network operation and management, ZTE Corporation proposes an NNOC (OSS) solution for ETC. As shown in Figure 1, this solution is based on an open interface and highly reliable architecture, so it may improve the network manageability and operability, and thus reduce the OPEX. According to ETC’s NNOC requirements, ZTE’s NNOC has a three-layer architecture: Network Management Layer (NML), Element Management Layer (EML), and Network Element Layer (NEL). It will utilize a Manager-of-Managers (MoM) architecture and business-driven approach that provides a single point of integration for all network elements, EMS and Operation and Maintenance Centers (OMC). The solution will also allow ETC to carry out cross-domain and nationwide event correlation and synchronization of end-to-end service assurance and fulfillment process. 

     The proposed NNOC has Unified Network Management System (UNMS), Resource Management System (RMS), and Service Management System (SMS). These systems are believed to provide ETC a handful of capabilities including unified network management, fast and visual fault detection and localization, real-time performance monitoring and easy service deployment and monitoring. Apart from the abovementioned subsystems, the NNOC also includes trouble ticketing management system, centralized power and environment management system, fraud management system, and Security Operation Center (SOC).

     (1) Unified Network Management System
     The UNMS provides the ability to manage a variety of devices from different vendors with large number of network elements scattered all over the country. Additionally, this system can improve the integrated management experience for ETC in fault, performance, configuration and security.

• Integrated Fault Management
  The integrated fault management module collects alarm messages from the networks and identifies service faults caused by network breakdown through network fault analysis. This feature enables operation and maintenance engineers of ETC to locate the sources of service faults fast.
• Integrated Performance Management
  The integrated performance management module provides real-time monitoring and historical analysis on network and service performance indexes. In addition, this management module can offer graphic and data performance reports, making it easier for operators as well as the management of ETC to stay up-to-date on networking and services.
• Integrated Configuration Management
  The integrated configuration management module provides the ability to monitor and check system configuration changes in the network. In  case of any configuration change in the network, the system will promptly detect the configuration change through polling, and inform the operation and maintenance engineers in the NNOC. Subsequently the engineers can see the real-time system configuration and even check for the differences between before and after the change through configuration auditing.
• Security Management
  Integrated to the unified network management system, the security management module provides the ability to properly control the access to systems, devices and operations. It assigns different access rights to different engineers depending on their job responsibilities.
  

     (2) Resource Management System
     The RMS is the central repository of all physical and logical network assets of ETC. RMS enables ETC’s operation and maintenance engineers to manage a wide variety of network and service resources on an integrated resource management interface. By associating network resources with service resources, the module helps to look after critical services on the network.

     (3) Service Management System
     In order to meet the basic requirements of ETC’s NNOC, the SMS is designed to enable ETC’s sales force and customers to directly order services. The proposed product offers rapid service modeling and flexible order captures by different channels. Its order entry and order management are enabled with scalable web based technologies. This system can also be integrated with electronic workflow-based service management subsystem and a separate trouble ticketing system. The process framework of service provisioning and activation subsystem includes: order management; service design; resource configuration; service configuration; and service activation. The service management solution also includes the service quality monitoring, service impact analysis, and service performance management capabilities.

     ZTE’s NNOC also provides the interfaces with ETC’s other Business Operation Support Systems (BOSS), including the customer care system, self-service portal, call center, billing system, payphone system, and other third-party planning tools.

     This NNOC for ETC is a complex project influenced by technical，management and other factors. ZTE has proposed a three-phase roadmap for this project, which will be implemented in the next two years.

4 Conclusions
At the end of this project, ETC will acquire an NNOC that seamlessly integrates the existing element management and network components. With this, ETC will build up the ability to see the complete picture of its networks from a central workstation. The unified platform enables ETC’s engineers and management team to plan and harvest the long-term benefits of an optimally designed network infrastructure that scales with the growing network. Equipped with an informed perspective of service-affecting conditions, ETC’s operations personnel will be empowered to proactively monitor the
service-affecting issues and initiate preventative measures to resolve them.

[Abstract] Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation (ETC) has acquired a patchwork of systems and processes that makes it difficult to cost-efficiently troubleshoot network faults, launch new services quickly, and track and tune the performance of services once delivered. This patchwork also results in increased operational and capital expenditures, so there is an obvious need for ETC to improve and evolve the network and service management environment. Evolving ETC’s network and service management systems and processes shall be done in a well organized phased approach. ZTE is the first choice for ETC to assume this challenging responsibility and provide the National Network Operation Center (NNOC) solution.