A TMN tune-up: MCI's platform helps employ TMN strategies across its network

A new Telecommunications Management Network-based platform will allow MCI to more effectively monitor the performance of its network and reduce development and management costs.

The Integrated Management Platform for Advanced Communications Technologies (Impact) will help MCI use its network more efficiently and provide new management capabilities for its intelligent network, ensuring greater network reliability and improving support and service for customers, especially those using broadband products and services.

"We want to make sure network capacity is available as much as possible, and we want to accomplish this at the lowest operating cost possible," said Joshua Morris, a director in MCI's network systems development organization.

Developed in-house by MCI, Impact includes a real-time fault correlation engine, which helps network operators quickly determine the magnitude of network problems.

Carriers have been somewhat slow to adopt TMN projects, but MCI's Impact stands as one of few active TMN implementation efforts. It could serve as a model for how other carriers might bring TMN into their organizations.

The system helps manage the process of generating a trouble ticket to fix the problem in the field, significantly reducing the time that engineers spend analyzing routine network activities for potential problems.

MCI will use this new platform to automate intelligent work functions, helping network operators ensure efficient and reliable network availability. Through this intelligent automation, the platform will enable MCI's network to continue expanding without requiring a larger work force, Morris said.

"How effectively we manage change directly affects our bottom line," he said.

John Gerdelman, president of networkMCI Services, estimated that Impact will reduce the cost of monitoring MCI's network by more than $5 million over the next four years. "This is another example of how MCI is developing cutting-edge systems and products that provide better service to our customers while saving millions of dollars," Gerdelman said.

MCI will implement the system in stages over three years.

According to Morris, the first stage will focus on improving the management of the transport network, using CMIP technology developed by Digital Equipment Corp. to more efficiently exchange data at the transport layer. In 1998, MCI will work to improve its cross-connect and switch software to enable better communications through the network, followed in 1999 by efforts to improve the network's data platforms.

"Our strategy isn't 'big bang,' it's evolutionary," Morris said. "We've got to make sure that we have each layer of the platform perfected and minimize the impact on our end users."

While the system will use a TMN-based approach to better enable managers to gather information on the network, MCI is not locked into TMN, Morris said.

The approach will enable MCI to incorporate technologies like common object request broker architecture more easily as the need for them arises, as well as to employ "enabling technology in the same way it's used in business environments to gain competitive advantage," said Morris.

MCI officials said the carrier's announced merger with WorldCom is unlikely to effect plans to upgrade MCI's network.

ACCESSIBLE ATM Linmor Technologies and General DataComm have formed a partnership to provide carriers using GDC ATM equipment with easier access to management data. The companies will blend Linmor's Nebula performance monitor with GDC's Apex ATM switching technology to allow carriers to provide customers with simple Web-based access to real-time performance information to verify SLAs.

AUTOMATIC TL1 MANAGEMENT Vertel is now reselling TMN QxDE, a software product based on components from both Vertel and Lumos Technologies that automates the process of developing Q-adapters and mediation devices for TL1 managed network elements. The software allows companies to preserve their large investments in existing network element infrastructures by providing automated access from CMIP environments to TL1-managed elements.