National clearinghouse expands: Telcordia and GEIS add two incumbents

Telcordia and GE Information Systems added Bell Atlantic and Southwestern Bell as users of its ServiceGate Exchange Link platform last week, bringing the number of local service providers directly connected to its national clearinghouse to four.

The pace matches Telcordia's projections to add at least two carriers per quarter. BellSouth and Ameritech began trading with Sprint in May, said Theresa Preslik, marketing manager for GEIS. Sprint is the only competitive carrier trading via the ServiceGate Exchange Link.

"We have a very healthy pipeline of [competitive local exchange carriers], and by first quarter, we'll have all the major [incumbent] LECs," said Michael Kret, vice president of interconnection solutions for Telcordia.

With ServiceGate Exchange Link, Telcordia and GEIS will offer new CLECs the opportunity to place orders for local service on a national scale by acting as a single gateway into all incumbent carrier's operations support systems.

"What we're trying to do is buffer the multiple changes that ILECs provide on a monthly basis to their interfaces," Preslik said. This was a key request from Sprint. Exchange Link also will provide application programming interfaces into the clearinghouse for CLECs who provide their own gateways.

"Sprint now doesn't have to worry about the variations in format that happen between the CORBA interface, the [electronic data interchange] interface and the real-time EDI interface," said Bill Stacy, operations vice president of interconnection for BellSouth.

Although welcoming the service, BellSouth will not steer new CLECs toward a particular solution. The incumbent sees it as an opportunity to offer a wider variety of options to CLECs, depending on their size, complexity and technical resources, particularly in personnel.

"Large CLECs probably will not use the clearinghouse and will come directly to us, and we will support them directly," Stacy said. "But in terms of bringing more CLECs online faster, that is a real plus for us. I hope they bring along another 100 customers."