Is the mobile telecom sector ready for open source?

I have often been asked "Is there a place for open source in the Mobile Telecoms industry". My ready made answer is always "YES".

Now let's take a closure look, in the consumer electronics market, open source software is widely used while in the handset market we now see open source operating systems being implemented in the latest "multi-media" handsets... think of Google's Android OS. So that easily answers the question, doesn't it?

How about the all important infrastructure side of mobile telecoms, the holy grail of most network operators and system vendors? The answer is again yes, however, today the usage of open source software in most of system vendor's equipment is not promoted. To find check the components of a network infrastructure and most likely you will find a hardware using an open source software. The use of open source software makes most of the software-dependent hardware to be sold at lower prices compared to when using a proprietary software.

The planning, management and optimisation parts of a mobile network are the areas where there is no open source presence or little penetration if any. Proprietary software makers dominate this sphere where software and applications are priced sky-high and in most cases more expensive than the hardware infrastructure needed to run them, justifiably so. The question then is why is that no open source solution exist? Actually you will be surprised that there are. For example the use of Linux OS and mySQL in several software application. What is missing is a complete solution or tool that is truly open source.

This is changing with the introduction of network management and due diligence applications that are truly open source. Further more decision support systems and analysis software covering planning, management and optimisation tasks that are truly open source are on its way to the market. A new era has begun, the age of free software :-)