A lock with no key

As the walls of regulation crumble, we hear the tick-tock of competition growing louder in our brains, and if the operations support system truly is the brain of the public network, then the ticking must be getting awfully loud there.

As Switching & Transmission Editor Beth Snyder wrote last week (Telephony, May 5, page 5), it has been 15 months since the Telecom Reform Act passed through Congress--much in the way a kidney stone passes, with pain but also immense relief. But the evidence of real competition is scant.

Although the legal ins and outs of interpreting the act eventually will be worked out, technological and operational hurdles can also prolong the wait for real competition.

The result of the OSS interconnection discussion, for example, will dictate how efficiently service providers will operate and how effectively they will compete. Unfortunately, we are already seeing some negative signs.

At this point, most carriers have missed, by four months, the original deadline the Federal Communications Commission set for fully unbundled OSS interconnection between carriers. The unbundled areas include five key phases of the service delivery process--pre-order preparation, ordering, maintenance, billing and provisioning.

The FCC's unrealistic Jan. 1, 1997, deadline has encouraged carriers to pursue individual patchwork solutions, making an industrywide approach more elusive.

Moving ahead, the industry must, of its own volition, establish a common direction on OSS interconnection through cooperation between carriers, and especially between standards interpretation bodies.

Some of the most knowledgeable and opinionated participants in the OSS interconnection issue gathered at the Network Management Forum a couple of weeks ago to discuss their progress toward developing industrywide OSS interconnection gateways and processes.

The proposition is difficult because information exchange is still a fairly manual process. Carriers will have to face the fact that seamless networking for users in the multicarrier environment requires competitors to have an increasing amount of control over the incumbent local exchange carrier's internal OSS functions. These competitors need access to functions ranging from service activation to network diagnostics, ideally in an automated manner. But many incumbent carriers are worried about their exposure.

"We don't want other carriers rummaging around in our OSSs and having access to everything," said Bernard Harris, director of industry standards at GTE Telephone Operations. "We need some type of partitioning so that competitors can't have control over OSS functions they are not supposed to have access to."

Like many other incumbent LECs, GTE is trying to meet OSS interconnection requirements by extending the electronic bonding agreements it uses to process long-distance carrier changes to include local service orders and changes.

Some say, however, that instituting and administering electronic bonding can be tedious.

Alternative solutions do exist, but they may be confusing the issue further. The Ordering and Billing Forum is said to favor a solution based on the electronic data interchange protocol. Other industry committees have worked on specifications that may help support either or both solutions.

Now, almost everyone is looking to the NMF or Bellcore to pull some type of common solution out of the wash. The NMF is moving ahead with a project to establish a common gateway architecture within the next nine months, and Bellcore may have something to say in four months. Either way, carriers are looking for a solution that will create a natural migration from their legacy OSS environments.

Even with all these balls in the air, the NMF believes that the work of different agencies and the elements of different solutions can all fall in line by early 1998.

Hopefully, that belief isn't overly optimistic because timing is critical. When the European market frees up for competition next year, the common OSS interconnection gateway of the U.S. market may become the common approach for the rest of the world. Let's get it right the first time.