LEVEL 3'S NEW MOXIE: HELP YOURSELF

It takes a clean slate to come up with something new, a luxury most service providers have long forgotten. And it takes too darn long to plan, purchase and provision circuits, an albatross that service providers have been unable to shed. But the folks at Level 3 have started fresh and come up with a new answer to the provisioning problem.

It is not clear how long a carrier has to be in business before its green field coloring begins to wear off. Perhaps the rapid pace of change in telecom over the last four years just makes it seem like Level 3 Communications has been around a long time. Maybe it's the company's seasoned management or its history, which can be traced 17 years to Kiewit Diversified Group, a subsidiary with a parentage as old as telecom itself.

But the network, the heart of Level 3, is green. It's as new as a network can be and have most of the bugs worked out of it. As such, it is blessed with the nimbleness of youth.

Level 3, a carrier's carrier, has taken advantage of its pliable, young network architecture and its malleable — if not miniaturized — management staff to create a Web-based provisioning system called On-Net Transport Activation Process, or ONTAP, that most legacy providers would be hard-pressed to mimic.

“Everybody knows while there is capacity of varying degrees available, there has always been difficulty delivering that capacity to customers on the schedules they would like,” said Van Macatee, group vice president of global operations for Level 3.

The new provisioning system has taken turn-up intervals for optical transport from months to a respectable and competitive seven to 10 days. And that's not even the best feature.

ONTAP'S FIVE-STEP, 10-DAY (MAX) PROCESS*

STEP 1 - View capacity and location availability through a Web interface

STEP 2 - Validate provisioning and billing information, get credit approval, notify Level 3 if desired capacity is not available

STEP 3 - Design, assign and activate service

STEP 4 - Perform continuity tests for circuit acceptance

STEP 5 - Resolve jeopardy issues

*Supports (3)Link Private Line services (DS-3 to OC-48), (3)Link Unprotected Private Line services (OC-3 to OC-12) and (3)Link Global Wavelength services (2.5 Gb/s and 10 Gb/s)

ONTAP software consists of sets of business rules supported by automated systems for tracking and verifying available network inventory and is accessible through the Web. Because it was developed in-house, it is vendor-neutral with regard to network elements and other OSSs. “That's the science,” Macatee said. “The art is to accomplish it. Our intent is to make sure capacity is never the reason why services can't be fulfilled.”

Users such as Dallas-based Masergy and Time Warner Telecom say using ONTAP has helped them cut their planning cycles by giving them a window into the real-time availability of bandwidth on Level 3's network.

“The ability to verify facilities and alternate routes is huge,” said Gerald Poe, senior manager of network provisioning and infrastructure engineering for Masergy. “Other carriers took five days just to find out if they had facilities available.”

Masergy has 10 OC-12 facilities through Level 3, which connect Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, New York, San Diego and San Francisco. The company sells virtual private network and advanced IP services to large and medium-sized enterprise customers.

As Level 3 did with ONTAP, Masergy built its own provisioning system. In fact, the company bucked the industry trend by building most of its own OSSs, including order management, inventory and element management, activation, work flow and mediation for service level management.

Masergy's build-not-buy OSS approach stemmed from the same logic it used when deciding on a carrier for transport services. According to a recent report by RHK, the logic was to “put customers in control of the services they receive.”

That's what ONTAP does. It gives service provider customers direct access to Level 3's provisioning system and allows those customers to verify bandwidth availability, reserve that bandwidth, design their own circuits and get an instant price quote. “We wanted to give our most significant customers the ability to make our network look like it was part of their network,” Macatee said.

In what would seem a logical extension — but which is seldom the case — Level 3 gave similar capability to its sales force, allowing them to access the network and reserve facilities for customers they believe they have on the hook.

It helped make the sale at Masergy. “In a time and market where there is so much uncertainty about deliverables, Level 3 came through. And it has helped secure us a serious spot in this telecom arena,” Poe said.

RHK called Masergy a new breed of niche service provider and said the company's focused, application-specific approach to a select enterprise market is enabled in part because it is “unencumbered by the need to build out a physical network.”

Poe said Level 3's ONTAP process and the ability to deliver facilities quickly helped Masergy offer its smart programmable bandwidth allocation service ahead of its competition. “It relieved us of the strain of having to order, track and manage network availability over a long period of time,” he said.

Time Warner Telecom, on the other hand, owns much of its network. Time Warner targets the metro market and has fiber rings in 44 markets with more than 3000 buildings connected to the network. Each local market averages about 400 route-miles of fiber. To connect those markets, Time Warner relies in large part on Level 3.

Time Warner found the same nagging problem as it upgraded its network early last year from OC-12 to OC-48. “The problem with long-haul capacity from most long-haul providers these days is that you never know what capacity exists where,” said Mike Rouleau, senior vice president of Time Warner.

During the upgrade process, Level 3 stepped in with its ONTAP provisioning and reduced Time Warner's intervals, giving the service provider what Rouleau said was time-to-market advantage at a time when ISPs were failing and their customers needed somewhere to go. “Being able to capture market opportunity last year was important. Having a robust IP backbone gave us that opportunity,” Rouleau said.

Time Warner uses multiple carriers to provide its backbone. However, Rouleau said that all things being equal, things like ONTAP give advantages to Level 3. “Circuit delivery clearly is a differentiator,” he said, but cautioned that “price and performance also should be considered.”

Comparing provisioning with project management, Rouleau said, “You have to continually spend resources working with suppliers to make sure things are on track and that there are no surprises at the eleventh hour. With Level 3 you still have to do some of that, but because intervals are so shortened you don't spend as much time and resources managing the project.”

Level 3 benefits from faster turn-up as well as its customers. Using a coast-to-coast OC-48 as an example, Paul Bultema, vice president of global operations for Level 3, said a 120-day delay could cost his company as much as $2 million in revenue. The trickle down is exponential.

“If you quantify that for our customer who is channelizing that service, they may lose three to five times the revenue,” Bultema said.

The results that Level 3 and its customers have realized with ONTAP come primarily from the ability to reduce forecasting efforts and by provisioning circuits quickly when needed. The provisioning intervals touted by Level 3 and its customers are for on-net services. But because ubiquitous coverage by a single transport provider is not even a pipe dream, provisioning headaches overall will remain a malady in search of a cure.