Lending a hand, Nortel offers to help carriers make local numbers portable >BY CHRIS BUCHOLTZ, West Coast Bureau Chief

Northern Telecom will try to help ease carriers through the transition to local number portability through an outsourcing service that will focus on the changes LNP will bring. Nortel LNP Professional Services will offer strategic consulting, network planning and LNP deployment support to carriers to minimize the costs of implementing the numbering system and to leverage it to offer new customer services.

"Although the concept of LNP is straightforward, it will require an additional load on the network for signaling," said Peter Carbone, assistant vice president of systems engineering for public carrier markets at Nortel. "We're working to find out how to deploy LNP cost-effectively to meet the regulatory window."

The Federal Communications Commission has mandated that LNP be available in major metropolitan areas by Oct. 1, 1997, and in all households on request by Dec. 31, 1998. "That time frame places a major demand on the carriers," Carbone said. "We want to help carriers not only deal with the technical issues but also see that the advent of LNP will also give them opportunities to increase network performance and introduce new services."

Nortel's services, part of its Network Service Solutions portfolio, will include assistance in capacity management, demand forecasting, provisioning and Advanced Intelligent Network translations. The service will also include marketing and network engineering planning.