When we talk about billing and customer care, the tendency for most of us is to think about a Fortune 500 company or residential user as the customer. However, for many carriers, the customer is often another service provider. Offering these sophisticated customers quick and simple solutions for ordering services, accessing call detail records and communicating in other ways can mean lower costs, higher profits and more fruitful relationships for the service wholesaler.
CLECs including Covad Communications Co. (www.covad.com), NorthPoint Communications (www.northpointcom.com) and Rhythms NetConnections Inc. (www.rhythms.com) all sell their DSL services to ISPs and other carriers on a wholesale basis. Carriers of all varieties buy wholesale capacity and other services from fiber network operators such as Metromedia Fiber Network (www.mmfn.com), Qwest Communications International Inc. (www.qwest.net) and Williams Communications (www.wilcom.com). In addition, of course, competitive carriers purchase loops, network elements and sometimes services from ILECs. So, making it easy for carrier customers to order services quickly would seem to be more important than ever.
Wholesale Forecasts
A recent report from The Phillips Group-InfoTech (www.phillips-infotech.com) projects the U.S. wholesale network services market will grow at an average annual rate of 24 percent to reach $116 billion in revenue by 2003, up from $39 billion in 1998. The surge, according to the Parsippany, N.J.-based research and consulting firm, will be driven primarily by IP-related wholesale volume.
According to the report, the rapid growth of wireless wholesale services, driven by Internet access, will jump from $500 million in 1998 to $5.5 billion in 2003. The second largest IP wholesale growth rate will be among new entrants to the industry (i.e., CLECs), which posted total wholesale revenues of $250 million in 1998. CLEC revenues in this space are anticipated to be $2.6 billion in 2003. The third largest IP wholesale rate of growth is expected to originate from packet/cell-based network service provider (NSP) services, which include the delivery of IP telephony. NSP revenues will jump from $2 billion in 1998 to $20.5 billion in 2003.
The growth in the U.S. wholesale market is being generated by three key drivers, according to Richard Kent, vice president, Global Professional Services at The Phillips Group-InfoTech: the impact of ongoing deregulation of the telecom environment and the growth in competition it has generated; the rapid acceleration of telecom technologies, particularly fiber optic transmission and switching capabilities that are resulting in the doubling of bandwidth capabilities every nine months; and the impact of the Internet on the demand for bandwidth and the transformation of bandwidth usage from circuit-switched voice to IP packet networks.
Carrier Care
So what are wholesale service providers doing to make it easier for resellers to do business with them?
"To differentiate ourselves it's essential to let our carrier customers have control over [network elements] as if they're on a network they had built themselves," says Matt Bross, chief technology office of Williams Communications, which provides networking services solely on a wholesale basis to other carriers.
Today, Williams allows carrier customers of its frame relay services to use a web interface to add virtual circuits or change committed information rates (CIRs) of their services without calling a customer service representative (CSR) or anyone else at Williams, says Bross.
In the future, Williams expects to make those same capabilities available to customers of its ATM and private line services.
To allow for the existing frame relay functionality, Williams developed much of the middleware tying web interface software from Objective Systems Integrators Inc. (OSI) (www.osi.com), provisioning software from MetaSolv Software Inc. (www.metasolv.com), a paperless engineering and design database (which is basically an electronic catalog of all the network elements on the network and where they are) from Visionael Corp. (www.visionael.com) and a billing system built by Williams using source code from InterTech Information Management Inc. (www.intertech.com).
Bross adds that Williams also gives its carrier customers a partitioned view of the elements supporting their services on Williams' network. "We've built a correlation engine where if one of the elements in a network complains--a switch, for example--we look in the database. If a customer is provisioned on that, an SBC [Communications Inc. (www.sbc.com)], for example, we send the alarm right to that customer. That's very different from what our competitors offer."
Right now, the carrier customer can't do anything to address an alarm, Bross says, but that could come in the future. However, as more intelligence is added to the network, Williams can give the carrier customer greater control.
Meanwhile, vendors are starting to offer software to do trends and analysis for resellers by the customer, trunk or service, says Michelle Nowak, vice president-product management for Info Directions Inc. (www.infodirections.com), which offers such a tool (MarginGuard, part of the company's CostGuard product).
Another major trend on the wholesaler/reseller front is the creation of electronic interfaces that enable resellers to not only order their services online, but in some cases to order their services online via their own OSSs and enabling those systems to automatically interface with those of the wholesaler for flow-through provisioning.
NorthPoint in November unveiled plans for such a service, called eConnect.
"Our customers have always entered orders electronically over the web or directly through our operating system," explains Michael Malaga, chairman and CEO of NorthPoint, which wholesales DSL to other service providers. "What this is is essentially a bond to our customers' back offices. What typically has happened is an ISP would enter an order to us and then enter an order to their own system for provisioning. Now they simply enter it to their own system and then it flows into ours. So [there are] much less opportunities for fat fingering."
Software from Vitria Technology Inc. (www.vitria.com) provides the interface between NorthPoint and its carrier customers' OSSs. "As you can imagine, everyone has a different [OSS], so there's a certain level of customization and cooperation that's required," Malaga says. "But we offer potentially a template to an open system to bond to, and that has a lot of flexibility built in."
NorthPoint has more than 200 carrier customers, many of which are ISPs. The first three carriers were expected to be up on eConnect in the fourth quarter of 2000, with the first 10 carrier customers scheduled to be up in the first quarter of 2000.
"We're putting the elements to allow ISPs to quickly assemble the tools they need to become a sales and marketing machine, so the ISP goes from network operator to sales and marketing entity," Malaga says, referring to the company's overall strategy of targeting the ISPs.
Opening an OSS to carrier customers adds another layer of complexity to a carrier's OSSs, notes Deborah Strong, principal with OSS integrator BusinessEdge Solutions (www.businessedge.com).
"You need to simplify ordering for these mom-and-pop ISPs so they can get in and out of it easily," she says. "So now, not only do you have to integrate your platform, but you have to have electronic bonding and make it very simple for people to sell it. So you want to make your back office almost turnkey so that people can get in and out of it very quickly who are not in your company."
Products from Vitria, NightFire Software Inc. (www.nightfire.com) and others help companies create what Strong refers to as an "ISPnet."
"[But] it's not just unique to DSL," she adds.
Another example is Focal Communications Corp. (www.focal.com), which allows companies such as OnSite Access (www.onsiteaccess.com)--a company that specializes in in-building DSL--to resell its local voice services, says Strong. Today, Focal carrier customers place their orders via fax, but in the future customers want to be able to do that electronically. The former Frontier, now part of Global Crossing Ltd. (www.globalcrossing.com), meanwhile, does a lot of long distance wholesaling and DSET Corp. (www.dset.com) wants to provide it with the interface to make that easier, says Strong.
However, the news on this front is not simply that carriers are creating electronic interfaces with one another, but the speed with which they are creating these interfaces, says Peter Gibson, managing partner at BusinessEdge Solutions. For example, New Haven, Conn.-based CLEC DSL.net (www.dsl.net) just announced it is using software from MetaSolv Software Inc. (www.metasolv.com) and NightFire to interface to Bell Atlantic-North and South (www.bell-atl.com).
David Struwas, president and CEO of DSL.net, explains the new system controls the company's inventory of switching equipment at each of the ILEC's central offices and allows it to put an order through from the DSL.net OSS to Bell Atlantic's OSS.
According to Strong, implementing those systems took just 90 days.
"The timelines for implementations have been coming down quite a bit," says Strong. "Now it's down to eight to nine months. If you can do it within three months it lends itself to an ASP model."
ILEC-to-CLEC Connections
Of course, much of the action in electronic bonding started--and continues with--the Bells and the CLECs. As a condition of their entry into in-region long distance, regulators are requiring Bells to open their OSSs on an equal access basis to competitors. And that means electronic bonding.
Cap Gemini Telecommunications (www.usa.capgemini.com) was recently chosen by the public utilities commissions in Arizona and California to handle the auditing of US WEST Inc.'s (www.uswest.com) and Pacific Bell's (www.pacbell.com) OSSs, respectively, for the 271 process. (271 is the process that Bells must go through to be cleared to offer in-region long distance. Bell Atlantic's 271 petition for New York was recently approved, making it the first Bell to break through that barrier.) Cap Gemini will test the ordering, preordering, provisioning and other functions of the two Bells' OSSs to ensure the systems can support a "significant volume of orders through their systems." It will test the electronic interfaces and the business functions in cases in which the Bells accept orders manually. Although Bell Atlantic could set a precedent for how electronic bonding between Bells and CLECs looks, the CLECs as a group have said the Northeast Bell's OSS is not up to snuff. In any case, OSS requirements for Bells to get 271 clearance differs from state to state, notes Jason Donahue, vice president of marketing and new business development with Cap Gemini Telecommunications.
