Turnstone turns copper corner with BellSouth cross connect sale

Turnstone Systems broke the Tier 1 ice recently with a sale to BellSouth of its MX500 Copper CrossConnect and ONYX automation software for operations support systems.

A successful field trial that lasted “the better part of the year,” according to Jeff Aaron, product manager for Turnstone, resulted in BellSouth buying the trial equipment and software and opening the door to possible future deals. Turnstone implemented the MX500 in an Atlanta central office and its ONYX software in BellSouth’s regional network operations center.

Enhancements made to Turnstone’s solutions during the trial made their way into the commercial product this week. Turnstone announced certification of its MX500 product through Telcordia’s Osmine Services process for interworking with Telcordia’s Switch and NMA systems.

Osmine certification means Turnstone support will be included in Telcordia’s latest release of Switch and NMA products for alarm collection and correlation and for doing inventory and assignment of MX500 resources.

“All the ILECs that use a Telcordia environment require Osmine certification to show you are integrated with their solution and their latest software release,” Aaron said. “We were fortunate to already be working with BellSouth and other ILECs, so it was more of a partnership arrangement with Telcordia rather than going to them for certification first.”

Other enhancements resulting in part from the trial are new automation interfaces for Turnstone’s ONYX software meant to incorporate copper provisioning and maintenance tasks into existing OSS workflows. The first interface, called the ONYX AI Alarm, was built for Telcordia’s NMA, which does network monitoring and surveillance.

Turnstone also added a test application to its UNE management system called ONYX Test. This provides service verification and troubleshooting tools for fault isolation and resolution by remote network operations personnel. The test software does both narrowband and wideband metallic testing, automatic number identification (ANI), time domain reflectometry, ADSL prequalification and spectrum analysis.

“Service providers want to reduce capex, but they are actually spending money for external test access equipment for UNEs, which they don’t have to do if they incorporate a cooper cross connect,” Aaron said.

During the trial, Turnstone cutover approximately 200 live unbundled network element (UNE) circuits to competitive carrier customers for POTS, DSL and ISDN services without human intervention.

“Copper is one of the oldest technologies in the central office and in local loop, but it’s the one that hasn’t gone through any significant evolution. The biggest operating expense is still the cost of labor,” Aaron said. “That’s where cooper automation comes into play.”