Lucent Readies Bell Atlantic Norths OSS for LNP

Lucent Technologies signed a deal with Bell Atlantic North (formerly NYNEX) in September 1997 to upgrade the RBOC's operations software systems to support local number portability (LNP). Lucent valued this particular contract at more than $35 million. This is just one of many contracts that Bell Atlantic has and will have to sign in the coming year with various vendors to get ready for LNP, OSS interconnection and the year 2000. In fact, every RBOC faces similar systems upgrade issues and with them, heavy costs.

Upgrades

Lucent's main task was to make Bell Atlantic's existing Lucent systems less dependent upon telephone numbers. Lucent had to upgrade the RBOC's loop maintenance operations (LMOS), mechanized line testing (MLT) and other operations systems to key on both location routing numbers (LRNs) and telephone numbers in order to accommodate LNP.

"The way tests were routed [before LNP] was that you could actually use the telephone number to determine a switch. Then, you could reuse the same telephone number to tell the switch "that's the line I want to test,'" explains Steve Izzo, solutions manager for Lucent. To run the same test in an LNP environment, the LRN is needed to locate the switch while the telephone number identifies the port. Changing software to cope with this new numbering scheme meant managing two pieces of data for many operations that previously required one. Lucent therefore had to expand Bell Atlantic's existing databases in order to handle the doubled data load created by the software enhancements.

Traffic is changing

Local number portability has changed the way that RBOCs must look at network traffic. Before local number portability, traffic problems, if they arose, occurred on the circuit switched network. When a switch or a trunk was overloaded, callers were, and still are, met with busy messages after they dialed. The SS7 or signaling network wouldn't be affected though, because it only dealt with calls that could be connected. In essence, the switches and trunks took the load off of the signaling network because if they were overloaded, no signaling messages would even need to be sent.

With the advent of LNP, switches will need to utilize SS7 more often, sending out queries to databases as soon as numbers are dialed. As the demand for queries grows, so will the burden on the SS7 network. Suddenly, managing SS7 networks becomes a major concern because they weren't designed to carry or manage heavy traffic. "The signaling network doesn't degrade very gracefully. It's basically a data network. The way the signaling network protects itself is [by dropping] packets." states Izzo. When packets, which allow switches to communicate for call set-up and routing purposes, are dropped, calls are lost in the network. Switches and trunks sit ready for calls that haven't been originated or won't be delivered and "you have a much more catastrophic failure scenario In this instance, a subscriber might be left holding a dead phone with no explanation. With switch loading at least you get dial-tone and a busy message," says Izzo. Subscribers expect to hear dial tone when they pick up the phone. With competition, network executives can't allow signaling failures to chase their customers away.

In order to prevent overloads from occurring on the signaling network, Lucent provided Bell Atlantic with its Netminder signaling traffic management (STM) software. Netminder STM takes data from STPs, looks at the overall traffic load and tries to detect potential overloads on the signaling network so they can be prevented.

Lucent also upgraded Bell Atlantic North's network trouble patterning (NTP) software to look for a new type of LNP related data coming from switches as part of call failure messages. This upgrade will allow Bell Atlantic's main Netminder network management system "to detect some LNP related call failures...The basic engine to do that was already there, what we needed to do was upgrade the algorithms," explains Izzo.

Provisioning challenges

Moving ahead, Lucent sees other major challenges arising for RBOC systems and processes. For example, when customers switch local carriers, not only do numbers need to be ported, but simultaneous changes need to be made to billing, line maintenance, customer accounts and other systems. While these processes can be automated, they must be timed properly with the physical changes at the switch and at the customer premises. This means that RBOC and CLEC technicians need to be in the same place at the same time to make the switchover. This kind of coordination won't be easy to master, and it carries a heavy cost.

Unjustified costs

Costs are a growing problem because while upgrades and new processes are necessary due to regulations, they don't add much value to RBOC networks in terms of new revenue opportunities. The business case for many of these projects is difficult to build. RBOCs don't really know how they'll pay for it all because they're still waiting for the FCC to release cost recovery guidelines. Each RBOC will face similar technical and cost challenges in the coming year and will be dependent upon vendors to make sure that their systems function properly and efficiently in the LNP environment.