LDMI shifts to NeuStar clearinghouse

As Southfield, Mich-based LDMI Telecommunications transitions to a facilities-based business model, the competitive carrier said this week it also will transition to NeuStar’s Convergent Clearinghouse for intercarrier order processing and provisioning.

NeuStar will manage on a per-transaction basis LDMI’s interconnections for E-911 and its ordering and provisioning of local services requests (LSR) and access service (ASR) as well as processing service order activation (SOA) requests.

Partly as a result of its acquisition of Mpower Communications' assets a little over a year ago, LDMI is moving from an Unbundled Network Elements Platform (UNE-P) approach to UNE-L. NeuStar will eliminate LDMI’s upfront investment stemming from both the expansion into new markets and its development costs for every local service ordering guidelines (LSOG) change required by the ILECs. It will do so by offering transaction-based pricing and managing the upgrades and changes LDMI has previously done internally.

"Instead of LDMI having to manage the litany of business rule changes that the industry puts on them, NeuStar takes on that burden so service providers can focus on delivering their products and services," said Lisa Donnan, vice president of marketing at NeuStar.

Donnan said that industry-wide, there are about 13,000 business rule changes per year and about 60 to 70 new LSOG releases per year.

Previously, LDMI managed its own gateway for ASRs, LSRs and SOAs. While they aren’t faced with 13,000 changes per year itself, the process was labor intensive and expensive.

"In our former model, when a carrier would require us to make a change, we’d have to invest development dollars internally and externally to our gateway provider to help us with that upgrade," said Kim McDonald, executive vice president of IT at LDMI. "With the NeuStar model it’s basically a transaction fee. So we know what our costs are based on transaction growth. It’s predictable.

In evaluating the NeuStar model, McDonald said she was initially concerned about the monthly cost of transactions, but is now realizing about a 50% savings. "We realized we were incurring these costs already; they just weren’t obvious. When we dug deeper to understand the true cost of managing our former gateway it was startling," she said.

LDMI is planning a softswitch deployment early next year and will use the NeuStar clearinghouse services along with its COMX OSS supplied by Telution, to expand into new areas.

The NeuStar model gives LDMI universal reach, meaning they can move into new markets and offer new service without having to invest in gateways services for each new market or service. "The number of changes and LSOG upgrades adds an enormous amount of complexity and management that without NeuStar they would have to take on themselves," Donnan said.

"And we’re happy to give that up," McDonald said.