For many telecom operators, the business support system (BSS) is the backbone of their operations. But if you’re still relying on a legacy BSS, you’re not just maintaining an outdated system—you’re bleeding money, and the full extent of those costs often goes unnoticed.
What makes legacy BSS so expensive? Beyond the obvious upfront costs, there are hidden layers of expenses that many telecom operators don’t account for until it’s too late. These include everything from maintenance and upgrades to the opportunity costs associated with slow innovation and poor scalability.
To better understand the true cost of legacy BSS, let’s break these hidden costs into three categories: upfront investments, ownership-related costs, and opportunity costs. Together, these costs make up the iceberg of legacy BSS, where the visible costs are just the tip, and most of the burden lies beneath the surface.
The hidden costs: 3 classes
Class 1: Upfront investments
When implementing a legacy BSS, the upfront costs go far beyond just software licenses. Telecom operators typically have to make significant investments in:
- Hardware: Data centers, servers, storage units, networking gear.
- License fees: Ongoing support costs for the BSS platform.
- Redundancies: Backup systems, disaster recovery solutions, and additional capacity.
- Set-up and deployment costs: Integrating legacy BSS systems requires extensive IT resources, planning, and time.
Together, these upfront investments are hefty and come with significant risk, particularly for operators who are trying to scale or launch new services.
Class 2: Ownership-related costs
Even after deployment, the costs of owning a legacy BSS continue to pile up. These ownership-related costs often include:
- Maintenance & Upgrades: Constant software patches, manual upgrades, and troubleshooting consume time and resources.
- Labor & Training: Specialized IT teams are required to operate and maintain legacy systems, along with ongoing training to handle complex technical issues.
- Property & Financing Costs: On-premise data centers come with additional expenses for physical space, power, cooling, and security..
While many of these costs aren’t immediately apparent, they contribute heavily to the total cost of ownership (TCO) over time.
Class 3: Opportunity costs
Arguably the most significant and hidden cost of a legacy BSS is the opportunity cost—what you could be doing if your system wasn’t holding you back. These costs include:
- Slow innovation: Legacy systems are notoriously slow to adapt, making it difficult to roll out new services or products in response to market demands or competition.
- Poor scalability: As your customer base grows, legacy BSS platforms often require significant capacity planning and infrastructure investment just to keep up. This restricts your ability to scale quickly. The same applies to wholesale mobile network operators, who thrive on expanding their MVNO market share. The planning, costs, and time associated with onboarding a new MVNO on a legacy BSS can severely damage any competitive edge.
- Customer churn: Poor customer experience due to outdated systems leads to higher churn rates, resulting in a direct loss of revenue.
Upfront investments: Legacy systems require heavy lifting before they even go live
Let’s start with the upfront investments. When deploying a legacy BSS, operators are on the hook for massive initial investments in hardware, software licenses, and redundancies. Whether you’re building an on-premise solution or expanding your infrastructure to accommodate new services, the cost of getting a legacy BSS off the ground can be enormous.
On the other hand, cloud-native BSS solutions are designed to eliminate much of this burden. Instead of investing in expensive data centers, telecom operators can leverage the public cloud, where resources are available on-demand, and costs are aligned with actual usage.
Ownership-related costs: Ongoing expenses that drain your budget
Once a legacy BSS is deployed, the ownership-related costs begin to pile up. Maintaining, upgrading, and troubleshooting a legacy system is a resource-heavy operation. Operators need dedicated IT teams to handle day-to-day issues, perform software patches, and ensure the system is secure.
Moreover, legacy systems require ongoing investments in physical infrastructure—from cooling data centers to securing the property where the systems are hosted. All of these costs inflate the total cost of ownership (TCO) over time, making a legacy BSS more expensive the longer it’s in use.
By switching to a cloud-native BSS, telcos can eliminate many of these costs. With true-SaaS platforms, upgrades happen automatically, without the need for CRs, and you’re no longer on the hook for costly hardware maintenance. Labor and training costs are also significantly reduced, as modern BSS systems are easier to manage and require fewer specialized IT resources.
Opportunity costs: Legacy systems hold you back
Finally, we arrive at the opportunity cost. This is where legacy BSS systems inflict the most damage—not just by draining your budget, but by limiting your potential to grow. Legacy platforms are slow to adapt, making it difficult to keep up with fast-moving market demands. Every new product or service takes longer to deploy, and your competitors are able to outpace you.
In contrast, cloud-native BSS platforms are built for agility. With AI-powered automation and no-code tools like Plan Design, operators can quickly roll out new services and test different pricing models in a matter of days. This allows telcos to stay competitive, keep customers satisfied, and seize new revenue opportunities.
The biggest opportunity cost of legacy BSS is the inability to scale efficiently. A cloud-native, multi-tenant architecture allows MNOs to onboard new MVNOs seamlessly, without needing to invest in additional infrastructure or capacity planning. For wholesale MNOs, this is particularly important because it lets them grow their wholesale mobile business without the constraints of legacy technology.
Visualization idea: A before-and-after flowchart showing how legacy BSS slows down product launches, while cloud-native BSS enables faster go-to-market strategies.
What about wholesale MNOs?
While all telecom operators face these hidden costs, wholesale MNOs have even more at stake. A legacy BSS doesn’t just limit their internal operations—it makes it harder to scale and onboard MVNOs efficiently. As the wholesale mobile market becomes more competitive, the ability to onboard and manage multiple MVNOs is crucial for expanding market share and generating new revenue streams.
With cloud-native BSS solutions, wholesale MNOs can onboard MVNOs in a fraction of the time, reduce the need for capacity planning, and minimize infrastructure investments. The multi-tenant architecture of modern BSS platforms ensures that wholesale MNOs can manage multiple MVNOs without the costs and complexity of legacy systems, creating a smoother and more profitable operation.
Your legacy BSS is holding you back—time for a change
The cost of maintaining a legacy BSS is more than just financial—it’s costing you in opportunity costs, slow growth, and poor customer experience. As the telecom industry continues to evolve, cloud-native, true-SaaS BSS offers a way forward, freeing telcos from the constraints of outdated systems and enabling them to compete in a modern, fast-paced market.
Ready to upgrade? Book a demo today and discover how Totogi’s cloud-native, SaaS telecom BSS can help you reduce costs, boost innovation, and deliver superior customer experiences
