New Year Presents New Challenge for FairPoint

As the new year approaches, FairPoint Communications will start chewing up what it bit off in the old year — 1.6 million Verizon telephone lines in three northern New England states that it must consolidate into a single regional network.

FairPoint paid $2.17 billion for the Verizon lines in March and has been working ever since to consolidate them into a single OSS/BSS system. It’s been tough; the company has rescheduled the ultimate cutover several times, most recently promising finality by Jan. 30, 2009.

“The primary goal is to take the huge volume of systems that Verizon has (somewhere around 358) and shrink them down to a more manageable model,” said Ralph Wasner, vice president of IT at FairPoint.

FairPoint is using Capgemini as a system integrator with a heavy dose of Cisco equipment, including new OSS solutions. Neither vendor, operating under non-disclosure agreements, would talk about the process other than to confirm they were working with FairPoint.

“Our engagement with FairPoint in that [OSS] area hasn’t been publicly announced,” said Mike Capuano, senior manager of service provider solutions marketing at Cisco Systems Inc. “[But] we have quite a portfolio of OSS solutions. We provide MPLS provisioning. We have things like our MPLS diagnostic expert. We have quite a lot of OSS solutions. That said, we are certainly not well known for OSS right now. I can confirm we are working with FairPoint on an OSS project, but I can’t get into detail on what that is.”

Wasner said there are different types of expertise. “We provide the telecom piece of the expertise; we understand how the business works. Capgemini is helping come up with a solution for Verizon at this point,” said Wasner. “No internal IT staff is big enough to build a solution of this size and be cost effective.”

Cisco is providing the OSS technology for a new IP MPLS network that FairPoint is building concurrent with the Verizon integration, and Capgemini is tasked with integrating that into the operating system that includes the Verizon pieces.

FairPoint, with the help of its vendors, looks at each Verizon system and determines where it fits into the FairPoint network fabric. Simultaneously, the carrier continues to roll out an ambitious IP MPLS-based broadband network under the direction of Michael Brown, vice president of network engineering.

“Cisco is going to be the main structure building block of the network that Mike Brown is building. There will be pieces that plug into that that are not Cisco, but in core essence, we’re looking at Cisco to be the core driver of the network,” Wasner said. “If you look at the non-Mike Brown version of the world, Cisco’s big play is in our back-office infrastructure and our connectivity to their management elements [where] they furnish a lot of the management and routing components too.”