NSN, Ericsson and Huawei Agree on OSS Interoperability

Nokia Siemens Networks, Ericsson and Huawei, major OSS vendors, have initiated and signed a MoU enabling utilization of OSS innovations across the industry.

To help operators simplify network operations and reduce costs, the companies have agreed to cross-license the OSS interfaces used for multi-vendor network management.

By enabling multi-vendor interoperability ‘up front’ between the OSS of all three vendors, OSSii is aimed at promoting competition by simplifying operations, reducing the overall integration costs as well as speeding up the time-to-market of new services.

The reciprocal agreement will cover fault, performance, configuration and basic network event and trace management for the northbound interfaces from Radio Access, Circuit Core and Packet Core network management systems.

Under the terms of the MoU, the signing parties are committing to bilateral cross licensing agreements for multi-vendor network management.

The cross-licensing and interoperability testing is open for third-party OSS vendors by joining the OSSii.

“The OSS marketplace is a patchwork of standards and proprietary interfaces that are controlled by the IPR owners. With cross-license agreements, we want to help operators take full advantage of the best available products in our industry,” said Peter Patomella, head of operations support systems (OSS) business at Nokia Siemens Networks. “Openness and fairness have been the guiding principles in the agreement of the OSS Interoperability Initiative.”