Demos crowd NMF dance card

The Network Management Forum's TeleManagement World conference and expo takes place this week in Paris. Numerous technology demonstrations should lend a practical air to the forum's usual seminar-laden program.

The show, which will celebrate the NMF's 10th anniversary as the international industry's primary interpreter of network, business and operational management standards, will feature four collections of demonstrations supporting the agency's efforts help breed commercial Telecommunications Management Network applications and operations support system (OSS) interconnection gateways.

The NMF's Catalyst project for OSS interconnection may be the most anxiously anticipated of these demonstrations. Standardized OSS interconnection has been mandated by the FCC and is one of the keys to ensuring reliable carrier-to-carrier information exchanges and access to unbundled network elements.

The demonstrations will look at the progress several companies have been making in this area, including GTE, MetaSolv Software Inc., Quintessent Communications, DSET Corp., Objective Systems Integrators, IBM and Broadcom. The results of these demonstrations may help the NMF produce a standard recommendation for OSS interconnection.

"Although the demonstrations will feature works in progress, they are all based on real-world products that have been integrated using common guidelines established by the NMF," said Keith Willets, NMF president and European managing director at TCSI Corp.

The NMF's ongoing Smart TMN project has spawned three demonstration programs. The plug-and-play service fulfillment demonstrations will show how applications from different suppliers can be linked using existing technology to activate premium-class Sonet service and service level agreement notification. Vendors participating in these demonstrations include Northern Telecom, MetaSolv and CrossKeys Systems Corp.

The second program, plug-and-play service assurance, mixes and matches different fault management solutions and examines if a common common object request broker architecture bus can serve as integration mechanism. TCSI, Hewlett-Packard Co., ISR Global Telecom, Clarify, Netmansys and ObjectStream will participate.

Smart TMN's third demonstration, end-to-end service configuration, will involve BT, Telecom Italia and Newbridge Networks.

Platinum Technology will announce that it has delivered its Paradigm Plus customized component modeling solution to the NMF. The NMF had selected Paradigm Plus as a method of establishing application component consistency and reuse.

Competitive local exchange carrier ACSI last week announced it is changing its name to e-spire Communications Inc. and simultaneously introduced an integrated T-1 service targeted at small and medium-sized businesses.

The new service, dubbed Platinum, provides flat-rate local calling with custom calling features, along with data and Internet connectivity, over a single communications link. Customers also can sign up for long-distance service at 6.9 cents a minute.

"This is the [Bell regional holding companies'] worst product nightmare," said Vernon Irvin, e-spire's senior vice president of marketing and strategy, who pointed out that regulations prohibit RHCs from offering anything other than local voice and data service.

Platinum will be available immediately in 17 markets. E-spire will add an additional 10 markets later this year and expects to be able to deliver a single invoice for switched and bundled services by the third quarter.

Bundled services, including voice, data and Internet connectivity, have been the "Holy Grail" for carriers, said James Henry, telecom analyst for Bear Sterns & Co. "This is something almost all the other CLECs are trying to get to," he said. "The convenience of having all services on a single bill should be very compelling."

Also last week, e-spire was named as one of three CLECs-including ICG Communications and Eagle Communications-that would provide thousands of primary rate ISDN circuits to Internet service provider PSINet. PSINet will use the CLEC facilities with RHC lines to provide customers greater reliability via alternate paths to the Internet.

OMNIPOINT TO ADDRESS GSM SECURITY CONCERNS Omnipoint will change the formulas used in its GSM phone service. A software engineer and two graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley reported last week that they could extract security information from GSM phones to make illegal calls.

IP BACKBONE FOR INTERNET2 The University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development will work with Qwest Communications to provide the Abilene Internet2 IP backbone network. The project will provide high-capacity Internet access to educational and research facilities.

CALL-NET BIDS FOR FONOROLA In a deal valued at $1.12 billion, Canadian CLEC Call-Net Enterprises Inc. made an unsolicited bid to buy Fonorola Inc., a Canadian long-distance and data service provider. Call-Net owns Sprint Canada and is 25% owned by U.S.-based Sprint Corp.