Better bonding Electronic bonding gateway opens carriers' doors to competition >BY DAN O'SHEA, Technology Editor

Electronic bonding, a technology used mostly by local exchange carriers to switch customers' interexchange carriers, has emerged from the back office to the forefront in the transition to a competitive local environment.

Incumbent LECs must open their networks and operations support systems to any competitor to meet one of the Telecommunications Reform Act's prerequisites for entering other markets.

Although interest in electronic bonding solutions has swelled since the act passed, some carriers have had to face the fact that they lack the expertise, time and money to build such solutions.

However, Telesphere Solutions, a Palo Alto, Calif., affiliate of ADC Telecommunications, has unveiled a development environment, called PowerGATE, that can shorten the time to implement electronic bonding gateways by 50% to 75%, said Jason Donahue, vice president of sales and marketing at Telesphere.

PowerGATE is an object-oriented software platform that lets carriers develop and test gateways for several different electronic bonding applications, including resale ordering and trouble ticketing. It models gateways after both the Telecommunications Management Network and Electronic Data Interchange standards. An EDI interface will be especially appealing to competitive access providers, many of which still find TMN compliance too costly and complicated.

The platform has subsystems called VisualTMN/VisualEDI, TMNEngine/EDI Engine and GATEmap that build, maintain and edit gateway applications. The first subsystems house the modeling environments, while the engines build bonding managers and agents and provide interfaces for gateways. GATEmap is a data mediation software platform for mapping between objects or separate system interfaces.

PANNING FOR INTERNET GOLD Pacific Telesis is hoping to start a modern-day Gold Rush by offering northern Nevada consumers, small businesses and large companies easy and reliable Internet access services. The carrier last week rolled out Nevada Bell Internet, a dial-up service with speeds up to 28.8 kb/s, to about 250,000 residents and businesses in several northern Nevada communities. SURFING THE WEB BY LAND AND SEA Bell Labs' new Metaphorium Web site is playing a key role in its work in creating the next generation of the Internet. The virtual seascape, called "Message in a Bottle," uses an algorithm that creates a constantly changing site that allows users to explore incidental communication. "Subway Surface" features photographs taken outside subway stations and lets riders visit stops along the route. The site's address is www.multimedia.bell-labs.com.