BellSouth reinforces wholesale front

(Telephony) BellSouth today announced that it would pour an additional $500 million into its wholesale services business unit.

The announcement, coming at the start of the CompTel conference in Orlando, Fla., includes a three-pronged approach to the initiative. The first part of that effort is a shortening of the cycle times between customers ordering service and provisioning. At the higher end of the speed spectrum, the company is aiming for 30-day turnaround times for OC-12 links, said John Irwin, vice president of marketing for BellSouth Interconnection Services.

In cases where customers, typically IXCs and CLECs, know their bandwidth requirement in advance, BellSouth will pre-provision most of the equipment.

“Most of our customers are looking for things on a short-term interval,” said Bill Smith, president of BellSouth Interconnection Services and chief technology officer of BellSouth.

The second part of the initiative will come in new products that move up the optical evolutionary scale that build on the recent deployment of OC-192 services. In the second half of the year, the company also will begin testing 100Mb LAN interconnection to Sonet services.

The final part of the effort will introduce new pricing plans.

On a practical level, the company is also shifting 1100 technicians to concentrate on interconnect services. That group will be added to the 3600 technicians that already are under the interconnect group. “The demand already exists,” said Smith.