Bonding revisited

The recent announcement that Bell Atlantic and Allegiance Telecom had electronically bonded may prove to be a key breakthrough-although not for the reason the carriers first claimed. Listening to them, you would think no other Bell company had electronically interconnected its operations support systems with a competitive local exchange carrier except to support resale services.

But Bill Stacy, operations vice president for interconnection services for BellSouth, says six CLECs currently connect their ordering systems directly with BellSouth's to obtain unbundled loops, local number portability and the like-and two facilities-based CLECs are even interconnecting their trouble ticketing systems. Ameritech already has more than 20 facilities-based CLECs with a direct connection into its operations support system, a spokesman said.

Certainly those numbers are small compared with the total number of facilities-based CLECs. The others must rely on less efficient Web- or fax-based interfaces. What is unique about the Allegiance announcement is that it may help address concerns that created this situation.

Several industry groups have been working to define OSS interconnection standards. What information should be on an order form? How many characters should each information field have? Without agreement on those basic parameters, two separate OSSs would not be able to interface. Business rules, which define what specific entries are acceptable for each field and help prevent incorrect entries, are also critical.

Where Allegiance's vendors have added value-MetaSolv for the OSS and DSET for the gateway-is in incorporating Bell Atlantic's business rules and uncovering and addressing error conditions not anticipated by those rules, says Allegiance President and COO Dan Yost.

Comments from Stacy underscore the importance of this achievement: BellSouth currently gives CLECs its business rules on a diskette that contains the equivalent of 2700 printed pages and advises the CLEC to incorporate those rules into its OSS.

DSET and MetaSolv already have done much of that work. With incremental effort, DSET anticipates being able to interface with other OSSs and RBOCs, and it already is offering its gateway to other CLECs. Ultimately, that should help put electronic OSS-to-OSS interfaces within reach of more CLECs and give facilities-based competition a badly needed boost-even if the recent announcement isn't a "first."