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Bell Atlantic implements manual workaround to CLEC problem

But says it may drop ECXpert as its e-commerce platform for rivals to switch customers.

By David Rohde
Network World, 02/23/00

Bell Atlantic says it is now processing orders from competitive local exchange carriers on time, following recent allegations that it has missed installation dates on tens of thousands of CLEC orders in New York State.

But Bell Atlantic also admits it's doing a lot of the work manually and hasn't found a permanent fix for an ongoing logjam of orders in its electronic CLEC ordering system.

And in a report to state regulators filed late Tuesday, Bell Atlantic also revealed that it may scuttle the electronic system - based on Netscape's ECXpert transaction platform - if it can't find out soon why it's been holding up orders.

Bell Atlantic's latest report comes after several weeks of accusations that the RBOC is falling down on the job of providing open local competition in New York - a mere two months after regulators gave Bell Atlantic the right to carry long-distance traffic as a reward for opening up its local market.

[see:Bell Atlantic system glitches irk CLECs]

The problems generally affect CLEC orders for residential and small-business telephone customers rather than large-enterprise orders for high-capacity CLEC services. But if they remain unsolved, analysts fear that the process of granting Bell-company long-distance approvals in more states will be slowed.

In the report, ordered up by the New York Public Service Commission, Bell Atlantic says both it and some of the affected CLECs have implemented "new hardware" that improves receipt of order acknowledgements by CLECs to more than 90%. The new hardware on the Bell Atlantic side includes two new Sun E6500 servers, though it was not immediately known what other new hardware is involved.

Bell Atlantic also is having an engineer manually check orders processed every hour, 24-7. The engineer on duty makes sure that orders are re-entered if the total number of acknowledgements sent out doesn't synch up with the number of CLEC orders received.

But Bell Atlantic admits that the software problem continues, particularly around issues of scalability now that the New York market has been thrown wide open and all carriers are competing in all markets. The "key deficiencies" of ECXpert - which is now officially offered by a Sun-Netscape alliance called iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions - are "sporadic failure to generate notices, extensive logging activities that degrade performance, and lack of record traceability," the report charges.

The report also states that "skilled software engineers from across [Bell Atlantic] have been temporarily reassigned from other projects to address this issue." Over the long President's Day weekend, Bell Atlantic even removed people from testing of its local-competition systems in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania - the three states where it is hoping to apply for long-distance authority beginning this summer - to work on the New York problem, according to the report.

If Bell Atlantic removes ECXpert from the CLEC ordering process, it will replace it with a proprietary Bell Atlantic EDI platform, the report goes on to say.

Bell Atlantic and CLEC officials are due to meet Thursday morning to agree on a path going forward and are expected to discuss whether or not to continue with the effort to repair the software deficiencies.