Leveraging LNP

Local number portability is the obvious solution to the country's growing number shortage, but the industry also can use it to provide geographic and service portability - and even promote competition

Telecommunications industry experts have acknowledged that the delivery of local number portability has been more complex than the advent of equal access. And while LNP initially was designed to allow phone numbers to be ported between carriers, the technology offers additional possibilities to the industry as it evolves and expands.

LNP is available in the top 100 metropolitan statistical areas of North America and was established primarily to spur competition among local service providers. Currently, LNP allows end users to switch local service providers without changing their telephone numbers. Yet the capabilities of this technology are much broader. When used to its fullest extent, LNP could expand service provider portability to include wireless service providers, prompting broader levels of competition in the wireless arena. It could include geographic portability so that, in theory, customers could keep the same phone numbers they have now for the rest of their lives, no matter where in North America they moved. And LNP could permit service portability so that customers could switch the service underlying their phone numbers just as they change a POTS line into a digital switch or an ISDN line.

LNP also is extending the life of the North American Numbering Plan, which one day could be exhausted, leaving no new 10-digit telephone numbers to assign. Through LNP technology, service providers now essentially can transfer and share telephone numbers between each other in blocks of 1000 - called number pooling - rather than the network-mandated 10,000-number blocks.

Implementing LNP not only speaks to customer convenience, but it also provides the most economic use of the telecom industry's finite resource. In short, LNP can save the industry hundreds of millions of dollars.

The beginnings of LNP

LNP was first envisioned in early trials in 1994 and 1995 and later was mandated in FCC Order 97-74 as a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Having the ability to switch service providers while retaining the same phone number is a fundamental tenet of competition; the inconvenience caused by changing phone numbers forces many customers to forgo the option of selecting a new local service provider. In fact, many customer studies have shown that more than 80% of customers queried would not change their local service provider if it required changing their telephone number.

The industry accomplished the task of porting long-distance and toll-free calls between different providers years ago. But porting local calls is more difficult because the numbers themselves are connected to a physical local switch. LNP circumvents the switching problem by creating a local routing number for each switch. A database called a service management system, referred to here as SMS, tracks the LRNs and updates the downstream switches, which, in turn, use the LRN to route calls.

To implement LNP, a service provider must take two steps: update its switches to use LRNs to route telephone calls and create or procure an SMS database to coordinate the switch updates. Then the provider must link its SMS database to the clearinghouse that serves as a master registry. This LNP clearinghouse ensures that all service providers have current, accurate and timely data necessary to guarantee the proper routing of a call from the old service provider to the new one (Figure 1).

For purposes of LNP, North America is divided into eight regions, with seven regions in the U.S. - mid-Atlantic, Midwest, Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, Western and West Coast - and one region in Canada. Each region is served by a central master registry, called the Number Portability Administration Center SMS, in Chicago. All eight NPAC SMSs in the U.S. and Canada are administered by NeuStar, formerly a division of Lockheed Martin (see sidebar on this page).

The NPAC SMS coordinates the porting of telephone numbers between carriers and downloads, routing information to carriers' local SMSs, which then update local routing databases within their associated switches. Although the NPAC SMS is the master registry that synchronizes the carriers' local SMSs, the NPAC SMS is not a part of the call path and does not actually route telephone calls.

LNP initially was implemented in Chicago after telecom industry representatives attended a series of technical and business workshops. During these workshops, the industry selected the LRN technology, which ultimately became the national routing standard, and chose NeuStar as the neutral provider for the LNP NPAC SMS. The FCC and state regulators in Illinois and Maryland established an aggressive implementation schedule, which required that LNP be operational by October 1997.

During this timeframe, the NPAC SMS was developed. In addition, the industry had to create and test its own local SMS and service order administration(s) to participate in integration testing with the NPAC SMS. Finally, the FCC ordered that the entire LNP infrastructure undergo 30 certification tests before LNP was deemed ready for production status.

As the industry develops new ways to help the network of networks function more seamlessly, NeuStar continues to upgrade the NPAC SMS clearinghouse software. Release 3.0, currently in development, expands the use of LNP beyond its original role and incorporates new features and functionality that allow the industry to pool telephone numbers more efficiently.

Everybody out of the pool

Service providers - and, increasingly, the general public - agree that only a finite number of telephone numbers exist in the North American Numbering Plan. The emergence of local competition combined with the proliferation of additional phone lines for new, evolving technologies and the inefficient assignment of telephone numbers in blocks of 10,000, has pushed the number of area codes available - practically exhausting them - and it continues to grow at an alarming rate.

One solution to area code proliferation is changing the way the industry distributes telephone numbers to carriers. Currently, if a local service provider wants to compete in a particular area code, that carrier must have its own central office code (CO code or prefix) in every rate area within the area code. Approximately 792 prefixes are available for assignment within an area code, which is divided by individual rate areas. For example, the 847 area code in Chicago has more than 40 rate areas. So in an area code such as 847, if a carrier wanted to service the entire calling area, it would receive more than 40 prefixes. At this rate, only about 20 new service providers, each wanting to serve the entire area code, will cause the area code to exhaust phone numbers.

The use of LNP, combined with new administrative practices, allows carriers to receive numbers in blocks of 1000 instead of receiving an entire prefix of 10,000 numbers. The same LNP technology that allows end users to switch local service providers also enables a pooling administrator to allocate telephone numbers and "port" telephone numbers among service providers. In essence, the technology that allows carriers to port numbers for competitive reasons now allows carriers to port numbers between themselves for inventory purposes (Figures 2 and 3).

To test this theory in practice, the industry is conducting pooling trials in a number of areas. For example, in Chicago's 847 area code, 1000-block number pooling has saved 177 CO codes and delayed exhaust for almost two years. Trials also are under way in California, Maine and New York.

The need for number conservation is growing, as is awareness of the need. The FCC has authorized 10 states to implement conservation measures. Connecticut, New Hampshire, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin were given the authority to implement mandatory number pooling trials in November 1999, while California, Florida, Maine Massachusetts and New York received that authorization earlier last fall. Demand is high. Twelve other states - Nebraska, Indiana, Utah, Missouri, Iowa, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, Washington and Pennsylvania - also requested the authority to mandate number pooling trials and are awaiting FCC approval (Table 1).

Plenty of possibilities

LNP technology is highly flexible and has allowed the telecom industry to reach new strides in a very short timeframe. One area of opportunity will be integrating LNP provisioning (see sidebar this page) As the industry moves into the 21st century, LNP technology may allow expansion into three arenas: expanded service provider portability, geographic portability and service portability.

Currently, LNP is used only for wireline competition. While other communications networks - such as those for wireless, ISDN or DSL - are vast, they do not have the capability to port numbers between service providers. Yet by using the technology developed for landline LNP, other service providers could port numbers among themselves, which would allow individual companies to tout the quality of their service and increase competition industrywide.

Geographic portability is another possibility. The databases associated with LNP are advanced enough that, with the appropriate development, they could enable end users to port numbers across rate areas or city lines. In the extreme, they could allow customers to retain their phone numbers even when moving across state boundaries.

Service portability refers to the ability to switch a number among different types of service providers, such as landline, wireless, ISDN or DSL providers. With service portability, the number itself would stay the same, but the number would hook to a different type of service depending on the customer's preference.

Created by the industry to address a specific issue - that of competition - LNP has proved to be a versatile concept that can be adapted to resolve many of the issues that the industry faces. As future versions of LNP software are released, the technology will continue to evolve to serve the industry's growing and competing needs.

At the center of the telecommunications industry's complex local number portability arena is NeuStar, a company with a unique perspective of providing neutral clearinghouse services to the industry.

Formerly the Communications Industry Services division of Lockheed Martin, NeuStar serves as the administrator of LNP for the U.S. and Canada and serves as the North American Numbering Plan Administrator. Through these roles, NeuStar works with the industry to identify issues facing its members and facilitate, in conjunction with the appropriate constituencies, their resolution in the best interest of the industry. NeuStar's role is strictly that of a neutral third party and not one of advocacy.

NeuStar first assumed its number administration position in April 1996. While planning an LNP trial in Chicago, the Illinois Commerce Commission selected NeuStar (then Lockheed Martin) to develop a Number Portability Administration Center in Chicago. The NPAC serves as a master registry of routing information, disseminating that information to all carriers serving a metropolitan statistical area. NeuStar designed, developed and installed the NPAC operation, which was tested, certified in an FCC trial and in production in October 1997.

After the successful trial in Chicago, NeuStar was selected to provide NPAC services for a five-year term in the mid-Atlantic, Midwest, Northeast and Southwest regions of the U.S., which were followed by contracts for the remaining Southeast, Western, West Coast and Canadian regions. Today, NeuStar provides NPAC service management services to North America, porting more than 500,000 telephone numbers per month and serving more than 250 service providers each day.

Since the inception of the NPAC in 1996, many new releases to the LNP software have been issued, each with increased functionality and diversity. NeuStar and the telecom industry currently are working on Release 3.0, which will provide number pooling functionality to carriers nationwide.

Implementing local service order administration and local service management system solutions to manage ported numbers and communicate with the Number Portability Administration Center only solves a fraction of the total local number portability provisioning challenges faced by service providers. Local service requests, directory services, E911, PIC/CARE, design and assign and service activation processes are part of the end-to-end LNP provisioning puzzle and must be tightly coordinated to successfully turn up customer service.

Typically, a service provider has multiple systems provided by multiple vendors, each to address these individual business processes. Unless systems integration can be achieved, providers are faced with a "swivel chair" situation in which information is manually re-keyed into disparate systems.

Vendors recognize the demand for integrated solutions for end-to-end LNP provisioning and are trying to fill in some of the gaps. They now build systems with published application programming interfaces (APIs) based on open standards such as CORBA. These APIs provide system integrators and service providers with mechanisms to integrate systems by providing a series of documented program calls that allow external systems and processes to accomplish specific functions within the vendor application.

For example, by processing a series of defined steps associated with provisioning local telephone service for an end user, an order management system could recognize the appropriate process step in which to create a record in the NPAC. The order management system can instruct another vendor's local service order administration (LSOA) system to request the creation of a telephone number in the NPAC through an API call. The LSOA system would perform the requested activity and then report the success or failure of the transaction back to the order management system. If successful, the order management system would mark the process step as complete and move onto the next one.

Furthermore, vendors that may never have worked together under traditional circumstances are beginning to provide "out-of-the-box" integrated products. Vendors have pledged to enhance and support these integrated interfaces as their products evolve and industry processes change.

With the complexities associated with LNP provisioning, the industry can expect to see more integration of vendor products and more automation of processes through tighter integration between order management and other back-end systems. In addition to the long-term cost savings, the benefits include greater operational efficiency and increased accuracy. The companies that can implement tightly integrated provisioning solutions are most likely to emerge as the victors in the highly competitive local market.