DS-Hell, Take 2: Coping with DLEC fallout

Feb 15, 2002 12:00 PM

In the blistering heat of last summer, I spent the greater part of a month trying to get DSL from a local Internet service provider. The company assured me that I was close enough to the newly upgraded central office to get service. Curious to see if I could get high-speed access directly from Verizon rather than going through a reseller, I gave Verizon Online DSL a call, but they told me that my line was not capable of carrying DSL.

Hoping against hope that I fell into that small group of customers that are close enough to the CO to get service from an ISP, but not close enough to qualify for DSL service from the company owning the lines, I went ahead with the order from the local ISP. The ISP was reselling service from Rhythms NetConnections, a data local exchange carrier (DLEC). After several unsuccessful hours of trying to set up the service, I ended up on the line with the ISP and the DLEC. Their conclusion: I was too far from the CO to get service. I packed up the gear, sent it back to the ISP and got a refund. Case closed, or so I thought.

Fast-forward to a chilly day in January when a flyer arrives from Verizon Online DSL saying that my line was now available for DSL. Much to my surprise, when I called Verizon, they told me that was, in fact, able to get DSL over my home phone line and that it wasn't some cruel joke resulting from an erroneous mailing. I enthusiastically signed up for service, but within two days, Verizon Online DSL notified me that the order had stalled because Rhythms has never processed the disconnect order from July.

Due to stringent regulations placed on advanced services divisions of the Bell Companies, Verizon Online DSL is not allowed to talk directly to their competitors, much less assist them in removing a purchase order related to DSL service, no matter how long ago the order was placed. According to Verizon's DSL subsidiary, this happens "hundreds of times per day" with customers who previously had service from companies like Rhythms, Telocity or other competitive DSL providers and resellers.

I called the DLEC, which was recently purchased by Bernie Ebbers while in Chapter 11 reorganization (he promptly renamed the division WorldCom DSL). According to the customer service department, the company could not help me because "Rhythms had kept such poor records" there was no way of finding me in the system. And because WorldCom DSL didn't serve residential customers, they hadn't tried to do anything with the data. Knowing what hurdles lay before me, my hopes for fast, always-on Internet service faded almost immediately.

When I meet with journalists, policy makers and consumer advocates, I am often asked what happened to the competitive carriers. Although many reasons account for the massive burnout in the space--e.g., bad business plans, overly aggressive buildouts, poor management--what I point to the most is inefficient operations support systems (OSSs) and billing support systems. If you can't see your customers, you can't provision them. If you can't find them in your system, you can't bill them. It's a very unsexy explanation, but it's true in many cases.

My personal travail with DSL highlights a much greater issue in the telecom carrier space--the need for integrated software solutions to run the business. In the late 1990s, my firm began to see a split in the competitive local exchange carrier market between those companies that stressed good back office operations and those that gave this particular metric a low priority in their business plans. The most successful competitors in the marketplace today, Allegiance, Time Warner Telecom, XO, all share a focus on back office operations and good OSSs. That diligence came from previous experience in running a local phone company, which, anyone will tell you, is a hard business.

Hopefully, WorldCom DSL will find me in the system one day so I get DSL service, but I'm not holding my breath.

Robert A. Saunders is a senior analyst with The Eastern Management Group, a management consulting firm focused exclusively on the communications industry. He can be reached at rsaunders@easternmanagement.com.

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