Network management

Historically, most countries had a single telephone company having a monopoly position for all international, trunk and local telephone services. The current trend is for the telecommunications market to be opened up and as a result several carriers may be licensed to provide services in direct competition. Within the UK the presence of multiple separate networks with many points of interconnection spread throughout the country introduces a great many problems for the network managers in the interconnecting companies when calls are passed form one network to another. This requires careful management, and a great deal of co-operation at the working level. Network management is conventionally defined as the effective use of all available equipment at all times to meet the demands of the customers. It can be seen however, that this does not readily apply to interconnect traffic where you are likely to have little influence over the effective use of a competitors network. The irony is, that if one of your customers is unable to complete a call due to failure in another network they may blame you and may even switch to your competitor. As a result interconnect network management is complex, with less emphasis on the availability of the interconnecting network elements (although this remains a critical factor) but requiring greater visibility and control of the levels of service that are being achieved in real time