Verizon Service Group
December 10, 2002
Confirmation #5124135
Operator:
Pardon me everyone. At this time Mike Toothman
now joins. Mr. Toothman, please go ahead.
Mike Toothman:
Good morning. It’s about 10 o’clock, so why don’t we
get started. Let me see who’s out there. Is AT&T on the phone?
Gloria Valez:
One of them. It’s Gloria Valez.
Mike Toothman:
Hi, Gloria. And WorldCom?
Lissa:
Lissa is here.
Mike Toothman:
else is out there?
MetTel? Instead of me calling all these names, who
Speaker:
Allegiance.
Speaker:
COX.
Speaker:
Cavalier.
AJ:
AJ with CCI.
Speaker:
VATI.
Speaker:
Choice One.
Speaker:
COVAD.
Amy:
Amy with CTSI.
Speaker:
Zetel.
Speaker:
Telcordia.
Speaker:
Accenture.
Dexter:
Dexter with VARTEC.
Mike Toothman:
All right. I know I missed a couple, but let me repeat
who I got – AT&T, WorldCom, Allegiance, COX, Cavalier, Deset, VADI, Choice
One, COVAD, CTSI, Zetel, Accenture, VARTEC, and Telcordia. Who all did I
miss?
Speaker:
Quest.
Speaker:
Talk America.
Speaker:
Did you get CCI?
Mike Toothman:
Yes, sorry. Is that Pat?
AJ:
No, this is AJ.
Mike Toothman:
Okay.
I think I have everybody.
This is the
December change management meeting for Verizon East. Oh, I guess I should
introduce the folks in New York. In New York we don’t have any CLECs in the
room, it’s just me, Mike Toothman – go around the table.
Tom Rogers:
Tom Rogers.
Nicole Collins:
Nicole Collins.
Theresa Latimer:
Theresa Latimer.
Nicole Amofa (sp?):
Nicole Amofa.
Mike Toothman:
And Deb Christopher is going to be here. I don’t
know why she’s – sitting here an hour and a half for the meeting to start, and
she’s not here. I can’t help that. So before we get started, let’s have our usual
caveat, and that is, if you’re not going, if you can put us on mute as possible to
reduce the background noise, and if you have music on hold, please, please
don’t put us on hold, because it creates music and it’s a big disturbance for us.
Before we get started, just to go over a couple of
administrative items. Nick Ara is moving to another position and will no longer be
associated with change management. So Tom Rogers is taking over the change
management function for the east. Some of you may know Tom. He has been
running the change management function in former GTE and Verizon West for a
number of years. And Tom will continue to do that. So Tom will have change
management for both the east and the west.
But don’t take this as a signal that we’re going to one
change management meeting to cover both the east and the west. For the
foreseeable future, we still see having separate meetings, mainly because the
systems and the business rules and other processes are still different east/west.
So at this point we don’t see a purpose in combining an east/west meeting.
I think there’s very little overlap from a CLEC
perspective, those who attend the east and those who attend the west. So I
thought I would just, so I’m going to kind of run this meeting, introduce Tom, and
then Tom will be running the meetings beginning in January. Any questions
about this issue?
Mike Clancy:
Welcome to the east, Tom.
Tom Rogers:
Merry Christmas to you too, sir.
Mike Toothman:
Tom’s looking forward to this opportunity. The other
administrative item – Becky King will be retiring at the end of the month and
leaving, so she’ll be with us today, but going forward she will no longer be
participating in the change management meeting. And her function in part will be
taken over by Tom, and part will be taken over by other members of the team.
So it’s a little bit of a changing of the guard here at the end of the year in change
management in the east.
Mike Clancy:
Well, I hope congratulations are in order, Becky.
Becky King:
Thank you.
Mike Toothman:
Becky’s disappointing she’s retiring.
Becky King:
Right, woo woo.
Mike Toothman:
She’s been excited for a while here. So, unless
someone has something they want to talk about first, I was just going to start on
the agenda. Does anybody have anything they want to bring up at the beginning
of the meeting? All right. I guess first thing I see is the OSS interface change
management schedule. We don’t have a schedule for 2003, I see in the
materials. But it’s going to be the second Tuesday of every month. And next
month we’ll have the meeting dates. But it’s always going to be the second
Tuesday. I think there’s a little problem out in November, but we’ll worry about
that a little later in the year. I think the second Tuesday in November is Veteran’s
Day.
So I’m just going to move right into the discussion
topics, first one being an update on the Pennsylvania/Virginia uniformity. And
that’s going to be lead by Kim Brown or Ed Amotto. Are any of you guys on?
Kim Brown:
We’re both here, I think.
Ed Amotto:
We’re both here.
Mike Toothman:
All right. I’ll let you have it.
Ed Amotto:
All right, thank you, Mike. Kim, please chime in at any
point. I’ll begin with just kind of thanks to all who participated on our conference
for Pennsylvania last month. We feel that it went very, very well. There was lots
of folks on WebEx, which we used for the first time in our meetings, and we will
continue to use it. I thought that went very, very well.
As we noted, there would be a second conference.
That’s going to take place on February 20th from 1-3 p.m. Eastern standard time,
and we will be sending out a notice shortly that will have the date and the call in
number – all that good stuff – as we did last time. And then we’ll send out a
reminder when we get closer to the February 20th date. But we’re hopeful that
will go just as well as the first one did. And we’ll have some of the latest
information to provide you then.
As follow ups to that first call, we have the fullest of
NPA NXSs that is going to be published on the web in just a couple of days. It is
completed, we’re just going through a final review. In addition, you’ll also be
getting an informational bulletin from the Virginia conversion. There was a
product, Cyber DS 1, that was available in former GTE, but I think was not
available, if I have this right, in former Bell Atlantic. But it was made available.
That bulletin will be going out again. It’s just in the review stage. That will go out
in a couple days, and will also be posted to the Virginia website as soon as it
goes out.
There were some questions asked at the conference
in our one on one calls with CLECs regarding PAVA, and those questions and
answers are also in the process of being completed. I’m told that they are just
about complete. So all of those things that either started just before the
conference or happened during the conference as far as questions about the DS
1 product and the NPA NSXs, you’ll be hearing from us very shortly.
One other commercial that’s very important is we’ve
been asking for the completion of the new profiles for all those that involved in
the PA conversion. We have gotten them all back, but some of them need a little
bit more work. So those CLECs that are on this call who did participate in
providing those profiles, you should have already received a call, or you should
be getting one in the next 24 hours from your account managers. Please feel
that is a center of urgency. We need to get those things updated to be very
accurate and complete. Kim, anything else on the PAVA side?
Kim Brown:
No. Maybe just a clarification on Cyber DS 1, if I
could clarify what you said. The Cyber DS 1 product is a former GTE product. It
was available at the time of the Virginia conversion, but I believe we found some
problems with trying to order it, and this informational bulletin is to clarify how to
order Cyber DS 1 as a resale product in the former GTE area. I don’t believe
that it’s a product that’s available in the former Bell Atlantic area of Virginia. And
I just wanted to clarify that, Ed.
Ed Amotto:
Thank you.
questions from anyone on any of that?
And that is a big distinction.
Any
Lissa:
Ed, I have a question – this is Lissa. You could just
point me to the materials for the original meeting, but the materials from the
meeting, is that posted on the website under the training?
Ed Amotto:
Yes, it is.
Lissa:
Okay, and that will give you information such as what
USOCs you need to use if you’re in the old GTE region?
Kim Brown:
Lissa, this is Kim. All of the Pennsylvania conversion
information is being posted to a specific spot on the website. If you go in to the
website it’s under the VA GTE merger section. And it says PA OSS uniformity.
And there will be documents there. We have not posted yet the ISOC to USOC
mapping document for Pennsylvania. It’s being worked on as we speak.
Ed Amotto:
(inaudible)?
Lissa, did you get the original documents for the
Lissa:
Yes, I did.
Ed Amotto:
that information, as well.
Okay. That URL that’ll bring you right into there is in
Lissa:
Do you know when you’re going to have the ISOC to
USOC mapping completed?
Kim Brown:
I will have to check, Lissa. The last I knew, it was
being actively worked on and I’ll just have to verify the dates. And we can get
back to you on that.
Lissa:
Okay, great.
Ed Amotto:
Okay. Aside from – first of all, does anyone else have
any questions regarding the Pennsylvania or the Virginia conversion?
Speaker:
When you have this mapping available, will you send
out a bulletin, or we would just have to periodically go to this PA uniformity
section of the website to look for it?
Kim Brown:
It will go out with an e-mail notification, just like we did
last year for Virginia, telling you that it’s being posted to that site.
Speaker:
Okay, thank you.
Ed Amotto:
You’re welcome. Just also want to make sure – I’m
not sure that everyone that’s on all these calls is on the change control list. If you
are, you’ll get a copy of it. We find sometimes we information back that some
people have a need to know, but are not on that list. Just, so people should be
just checking that site regularly in any case, but we will be sending a notice out.
Any other questions?
Lissa:
I just have one more question.
targeted for your timeframe, was it the March timeframe?
And you’re still
Ed Amotto:
That has not changed. If there’s no more questions
on PAVA, just a side note. The New York City area code is being split, as you
should be aware. And the 1 plus 10 dialing reminder did go out that reflected
that February 1st, the mandatory 1 plus 10 dialing will go into effect in New York
for all local calls dialed between New York City and several different area codes.
That’s going to mean that some people need to make
sure that they do whatever internal software changes they need to make, switch
adjustments that they need to make, and any notification to their end users that
need to be done. And I’m just putting this out as a reminder. If you’re impacted,
that change control notice did go out, you should have received it. And just as a
reminder, to make sure that you do what you need to do to make sure that the
switch work is done on time. Kim, any additions to that?
Kim Brown:
No.
Ed Amotto:
Okay. Anyone? Okay. Thank you, Mike.
Mike Toothman:
All right. Thanks Kim and Ed. Moving on to the next
agenda item is the WCCC spot on the agenda. Is Pat on? Pat Pungitorie?
She’ll be here momentarily, I hope. Can I move on to billing and Pat Carney?
Are you on? Pat?
Kathleen Conroy:
Kathleen Conroy is on.
Mike Toothman:
Kathleen?
Kathleen Conroy:
Yup. How are you? I just have a few things that are
actually review items, actually 4-5 of them that are happening in the next month
that I’d just like to go through quickly and see if you have any questions. The first
was a circuit delimiter change which the notices went out previously for, and it
will happening December 21st, the December release where we’ll be changing
the delimiters to periods from commas, which will make them uniform across the
Verizon East footprint. That was a BDT only change. I haven’t received any
questions back from that, so I’m hoping everyone’s all set with it.
The second is the option to receive UNI listing on
BDT. That will become available December 23rd, and we did send a notice out
for that. And this is in New York, New England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and
Delaware.
Thirdly, Bill Manager training. We sent out a notice
for the training that will be happening. The first was on 12/05. Subsequent
training will be on 12/12, January 9th , January 16th, and January 23rd. We really
urge those of you who currently get Simple View to attend the training, because
eventually, for a time, you can’t order Simple View any more. There will be a
time where you can have both, but eventually Simple View will go away and Bill
Manager will be its replacement. We’re not sure of the timeframe yet, but we do
urge you to take that training if you’re a current Simple View user.
Next is installment billing. Just a reminder that the
installment billing, which is 18 month type of contract installment payments,
which was available April 1, 1998 – it actually went away August 14, 2001, but
we are just removing it from the systems. And by December, all systems will
have removed any installment billing contracts and installment billing options.
Two other things. Cartridges – 9 track reel to reel is
going away, as we’ve sent out 3-4 notices for that. As of January 1st, if you
haven’t opted to get NDM for your DUF or NDM or CD-ROM for BDT, you will be
converted to cartridge. So if you’re planning on moving to NDM for example, I
urge you to contact, to fill out a new profile so you can get on the list as soon as
possible to convert, because you will get cartridge until you request something
other than cartridge.
And the last thing, we sent out a notice for BDT
balance issues that we had, where the balance due on the 105-12 record had
been overstated and didn’t match the total USOC money. The total USOC
money and charges were correct, and the 40-15-20 detail record, but the balance
due had been overstated, and we will start applying those credits – they should
start hitting your bills in December and completing in January. So notices had
also had gone out about that, but just a reminder. Any questions?
Mike Toothman:
Anything on billing for Kathleen? All right. Thanks.
Can I move on to website enhancements? Linda, are you on? Maybe not. Carol
Yozzo, are you on? These people are just in time people, you know? How about
Mary Ellen? Going back up to Pat Carney?
Kathleen Conroy:
I covered everything for billing.
Mike Toothman:
I meant Pat Pungitorie, I’m sorry. All right, so since
none of these guys are on, they’ll be joining as we go along, I think, I have
nothing more to bring up until – I usually try to fill with little things of interest that
are going on, and I don’t know anything of interest right now that’s going on. So
we might want to move right into – Becky, are you ready for the items by
release?
Becky King:
Sure. Okay. First I want to mention that there was a
notification that went out last week for the new version of the ASR ASOG 26, so
you all should have gotten that. It went out as an industry letter.
Okay, the first one is on page 4 of 26, and it’s CR
2111.1. It’s a flow through one, to flow through the Work Smart package. If the
line is an additional line or if the class of service for the line is for a main line,
then the following error will be returned to the CLEC. And it lists the error and
the message. And this was on the error documentation that went out in, was
distributed in the beginning of November.
Monica Moore:
Excuse me, can you hear me?
Becky King:
Yes.
Monica Moore:
Hi, this is Monica Moore. Apparently I think there are
some people that you’re looking for that can’t get in to the bridge. I think the
operator has them on mute.
Carol Yozzo:
hear me now?
Yeah, this is Carol. I just redialed in. Can anyone
Pat Pungitorie:
mute after calling in.
Carol, I can hear you. This is Pat. I was also put on
Carol Yozzo:
We’ve all been here, Mike, and we heard you say
some nasty comment about how we were just in time people.
Pat Pungitorie:
attempt to get in.
Yeah, and Mike, we’ve been here. This is my third
Mike Clancy:
Mike, you’ve got to talk to that operator, because
usually it’s the CLECs that get put on mute.
Mike Toothman:
I know. She messed it up this time. I said pick on
Clancy, make sure you get mute on that dude.
Becky King:
everybody else go.
Okay.
Well I’ll back out for right now and let
Pat Pungitorie:
Okay, Mike, this is Pat Pungitorie.
Mike Toothman:
All right, so let’s go to Pat’s item, which is the
wholesale customer care center. Pat, have you anything to bring to us or are you
just here for questions?
Operator:
Excuse me, Mr. Toothman. At this time Linda Spinay
(sp?) has now joined with you.
Mike Toothman:
Okay.
Pat Pungitorie:
have.
I’m here for questions or any concerns that people
Mike Toothman:
Anything for Pat on the WCCC?
Gloria Valez:
Pat, this is Gloria Valez. Relative to opening up
tickets, when the WCCC does accept the ticket and it then gets referred out, and
then we’re given a name to follow-up – if we are following up with a person but
we don’t seem to be getting any further status other than the ticket is still under
review, and like two weeks go by, do we follow the escalation procedures that
are in the WCCC document?
Pat Pungitorie:
That’s correct. I would put a first call back into that
specialist and then if you still don’t get anything, then follow the process that’s in
the document.
Gloria Valez:
But if the specialist returns your phone call and they
just keep on telling you the same thing, like it’s still under review?
Pat Pungitorie:
Right. We’d have to look at the specific example, but
the process is if you’re not satisfied, then you need to follow the escalation
process.
Gloria Valez:
Okay, thank you.
Pat Pungitorie:
Okay. And Gloria, you called me the other day. Was
that the question that you had? Because you never got back to me.
Gloria Valez:
I don’t recall.
Pat Pungitorie:
Okay, anything else?
Okay.
Well if you remember, just give me a call.
Alex:
This is Alex with Allegiance. Quick question –
sometimes there’s a lot of confusion as to who can help with a particular issue.
To give you an idea, recently we called the Cert help desk because there was a
CSR that was incorrect which needed to be corrected. And they validated that’s
true, it does need to be corrected. In this case, the sender field was incorrect, it
was actually blank. So Jill Nema said the best way to handle this is to put in a
ticket with the WCCC. Now they’re not going to fix it themselves, but they’re
going to refer it back to the NMC and they’re going to get it corrected. But that
way it’s trackable. But when we call the WCCC, they say that’s absolutely not
correct.
Pat Pungitorie:
Well, if it’s an error in the back up records, that’s a
tough one, Alex. I’d have to actually look at that one and…
Alex:
But it’s a database typo is probably what it was.
Somebody did a typo. I understand it wasn’t a system issue.
Pat Pungitorie:
Yeah, see really the NMC should be handling those.
Lissa:
This is Lissa. I agree with Alex, because sometimes
in a CSR, the toss value is incorrect in areas such as foreign exchange, when
you send in an order you’re using the toss value as the CSR, but we come
across that, so that would be great to know if a policy, if you open up a trouble
ticket so you can keep track, or who could be responsible to correct that in the
CSR.
Alex:
To tell you the truth, I think what’s happening is over
time here, resources are dwindling across the board, so there’s more of a
situation that you’re told by the NMC to go to the Cert group, who then says
WCCC, and you sort of get the runaround.
Pat Pungitorie:
Well the NMC will answer any questions that are
generate by them. So if they send you out a query that’s manually generate,
then you need to go to the NMC. If it’s a system query, your first step is to go to
Cert, and then to the WCCC.
Monica Moore:
Cert? I think…
Wait, Pat, this is Monica – systems query goes to
Pat Pungitorie:
If it’s a how to type of thing. Because we’re finding
that what’s happening is the NMC is saying all system queries need to go to the
WCCC, and a lot of those things are how to type questions when it gets posed to
us, Monica. We’re more than happy to take the ticket, but they’ve never – when
they’re saying how do I do this? – that’s the role of Cert. That’s not the role of
the WCCC.
Monica Moore:
Right. So the how to order questions, ho w to
complete the LSR – those are Cert questions. When you said systems, I mean,
you know.
Lissa:
That’s a good question. I’m glad we’re discussing
this, because there is a little bit of confusion, because we were told to go to the
Cert group on any system errors, and they’re unable to help us, so we end up
going back to the WCCC especially on system errors, or in this instance to
correct a CSR. What is the procedure and process because it doesn’t work
calling back to the NMC to do that.
Pat Pungitorie:
Lissa, when I look at the tickets that come to my
team, most of them are resolved front as CLEC issue, that they’re not following
the business rules.
Alex:
NMC or Cert?
Let me ask you this also – on an invalid query, is that
Pat Pungitorie:
What do you mean by invalid query, Alex?
Alex:
incorrect.
Where it’s obvious that the query back to us is
Pat Pungitorie:
Then that would come to us. If there’s a query that’s
inconsistent with business rules, it should come to the WCCC. But many times
the query is advising the person issuing the order what they need to do. But
they’re calling in a ticket and they’re not looking at what the issue is.
Alex:
I understand that, but the cut and dry here, and I
didn’t mean for this to get this involved, but the cut and dry here really is, if you
really want to look at this from a global perspective, is that a CLEC shouldn’t be
diagnosing where to go to get help.
Pat Pungitorie:
If it’s a system query, they need to come to the
WCCC. If it’s a how to question, they need to go to Cert. If it’s a manual query,
they need to go to the NMC. However, before you go to any of those places, you
need to verify the business rules and to see that you’re inputting the orders
correctly.
Alex:
Absolutely, I understand that. It’s just that sometimes,
it’s just a challenge to do business that way because I think that it’s easier in
some cases for the NMC to explain to the WCCC why something’s an issue than
the CLECs trying to interpret. But the cut and dry is I appreciate your clarification
there, and we’ll just try and do that.
Pat Pungitorie:
If you have specific examples, Alex, we can address
those and try to go back. We’re kind of talking in generalities, but sometimes
when you have specific examples, it really helps in that it proves the point and we
can go back to the appropriate work group and say this should have been
handled here or it should have been handled there, do you know what I’m
saying?
Alex:
Sure. One last question then – just on a general
timeline here, what is the turnaround time on a business rule discrepancy? So
we’ve checked the facts, we’ve got a business rule that says we order a service a
certain way, the NMC queries it back, you said go to the WCCC with that.
Pat Pungitorie:
The NMC queries it back? No, you need to go to the
NMC. If they’ve generated the query…
Alex:
come to you?
If it’s a system issue that violates the business rules
Pat Pungitorie:
Right, that’s correct.
Alex:
Got it.
Elliott:
Hey, Alex. This is Elliott, I’ve been stuck on mute.
But did you understand this, with all due respect, enough to flowchart it?
Because I tried and got lost.
Alex:
Well, see that’s the problem is I get lost with it too,
when someone comes to me and says who do we go to? Especially it seems
like the role of the Cert I still don’t have down well. And I’m trying to know when
to go to them and when not to go to them.
Pat Pungitorie:
Monica, you want to answer that question?
Monica Moore:
Yeah, I’m getting real close to using the analogy that
Marion has used before with the turkey, but let me throw this out to you. You’ve
all heard it, but it’s worthy of repeating because then maybe we can use just not
a lot of time, but maybe some examples that I can give.
We show the use of the third person WCCC, and I’m
not going to address NMC, because I think Pat did a good job of it. If they send
you a query, if they’re asking you a question or they send you something that
says we need more information, or this wasn’t done right, then obviously you
want to deal with them in communicating with them. But the analogy that we’ve
used to explain the difference between WCCC and Cert is very much like a the
Butterball turkey hotline that people call to find out what temperature should I
cook this at, how do I baste it, how do I get the insides out of it, where’s the neck,
which side should I put in the pan? Those are Cert type questions, the how to.
You put it in the oven, you bake for a couple hours,
you open the oven door, the turkey has disappeared – that’s WCCC. So if you
think of you come in, you do an LSR, you’re following all the business rules,
you’ve checked all the documentation, you’ve filled out the LSR, you’ve filled out
all the forms, you send it in, and it gets lost in the system or you don’t get the
confirmation back, and you’re like I did everything I was supposed to do. What
happened to my order? That’s a WCCC ticket.
Alex:
Okay, I got ya. I think what we were doing then
incorrectly, if you will, was when we would know that we checked the business
rules and what we sent to the NMC was correct, the NMC did not accept the
order and they queried it back, we went to the Cert, they verify we did it correctly
– we were going back to the NMC at that point and saying Cert says that’s right.
Monica Moore:
Right. And Cert relies upon same documentation that
we expect you to rely upon. So we follow the business rules, we follow the
changes so when you get something that gets bounced back to you, we will be
going to the same documentation that you used to send in the order. So your
gospel is Cert gospel. And we will look at it and we will say you did everything
that you were supposed to do, it should have worked. In which case you might
be lead to think, “well, gee, then maybe there’s something a little off on the
business rules from a systems perspective”, in which case I think Pat addressed
that to be a WCCC ticket.
Alex:
Okay, I understand that. It’s just…
Elliott:
Monica, there’s just one point about your analogy.
When I want a turkey, I go to the butcher, one stop. I get the tail, the wings, the
legs, the whole turkey. What you’re describing is a rather cumbersome process.
Monica Moore:
bake it.
I give you the turkey, but you have to prepare it to
Alex:
I think I’m following Elliott, because that’s been my
argument all along, anyway. And that’s you’re telling the CLECs to diagnose
where the problem lies in the ordering process with the ILEC. If we send in an
order and it gets queried back, we should be savvy enough to know what’s going
on with it and move from there. If it’s hung up in system, really, customer service
and support, it functions better, I believe, to have someone in NMC go, I have a
system related problem here to get any sort of work for that customer, and I can
probably explain what I’m seeing better than the customer can to whatever group
I have to go to to get it resolved. In this case I’d guess you’d say it’s the WCCC.
So it’s very difficult for some of the CLECs to understand how we have to put in a
separate ticket with a separate organization about a system problem relating to
ordering a service through the NMC and have to explain accurately and
adequately the issue, which we don’t really know, because we’re outsiders on it,
you know? Is that about right, Elliott?
Elliott:
Yeah. And plus I’m looking at the time lag that it
takes to go through all these steps while I have a customer who’s not being
served.
Alex:
That’s the other thing. And don’t take this personally,
but the WCCC in the past experience has not been necessarily the most rapid
response group when you’re looking at a customer who’s saying, “when are you
going to complete my order?”. In other words, if the WCCC says it’s going to
take me a week to fix this, and that’s interesting, because we don’t typically get
the real timeline, we say it’s out there, we’re working on it. But even if we did get
a timeline and let’s say it was a week, that would be great to know, but that’s still
a problem if I have to tell my customer there’s another week here because
there’s a little system glitch kind of thing, that just extends the timeline instead of
understanding it to be more of a production environment we’ve got to move these
through. And some of them, I understand, are larger issues with systems – those
do take longer, and some you wouldn’t think at least that big of a deal, but they
don’t seem to be responded to more rapidly, necessarily.
Pat Pungitorie:
Well Alex, I do understand your concerns and I will
relay that back to my director.
Alex:
I appreciate that, because very seriously, I think we
could consider an alternative to the way it’s done today without having to
necessarily reinvent the entire wheel. And if that’s a change request, then I
guess I can put that in and we can all discuss it. Mike, do you think that’s where
we’re going here?
Mike Toothman:
point?
I’m sorry, Alex – where we’re going, what was your
Alex:
And I appreciate your attention to detail, Mike…
Pat Pungitorie:
I think, Alex, you’re looking to change the structure
within Verizon, and I’m not sure that that’s a change request type of situation.
Would you agree, Monica?
Alex:
I think that’s definitely Verizon’s auspice, but from a
process perspective, I think it’s…
Elliott:
Wait a minute, when you go to the carrier working
group and you want any sort of change in the process, they say it has to come
here. Now if we’re being told here it doesn’t come here, then somebody has to
say where it does go.
Pat Pungitorie:
Personally I don’t know, so I can’t.
Lissa:
This is Lissa and I back up Alex. I understand where
he’s coming from. And I think CLEC’s clearly understand as a customer’s
perspective that if you need something, especially in the CSR, that’s a very
difficult thing to get addressed. You can’t really go to the Cert group, you can’t
go to the NMC, and I believe it’s a trouble. You can’t process an order if it gets
rejected or things not matching up, or if there’s any other particular unique error, I
believe it should be a trouble ticket.
Mike Toothman:
Alex, just to make sure I catch you, when you said
this is where we’re going, was that like submitting a request for a change in the
process?
Alex:
Correct. Is that what you think that this would fall
under, or should we just do that to table it to have a discussion about it, or…?
Mike Toothman:
If you have a recommendation to change the process,
I think just send us a letter in to change management. It might not be a formal
change request, but if you have something, an issue, I think you’d send it in to us
and we’ll respond to it.
Alex:
Okay, then we’ll do that. How about Lissa and Elliott
get with me and we’ll do that and send it in.
Lissa:
I’ll be happy to.
Elliott:
And I’d love to any time.
Pat Pungitorie:
Okay. Any other comments on that subject?
Gloria Valez:
Pat, this is Gloria. Not really relevant to what was just
discussed, but it’s regarding a ticket. If your ticket is a pre-order issue related to
the parsed CSR, are there any guidelines as to when you would do a system fix?
Pat Pungitorie:
I’m not sure I understand your question.
Gloria Valez:
I have an outstanding issue right now with regard to
the parse CSR, how is the parsing out address information. Are there any
guidelines out there as to once you find the problem and you agree it’s a
problem, and you say you need to fix it, what timelines are out there to get it
fixed?
Pat Pungitorie:
Have you submitted a trouble ticket to this issue?
Gloria Valez:
Oh, yup.
Pat Pungitorie:
Why don’t you give me the trouble ticket and then I
can look at it? I’m not familiar with that issue.
Gloria Valez:
guideline?
I’d be more than happy to do that. But there’s no
Pat Pungitorie:
I have to look at the particular ticket to find out exactly
what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you mean be guideline, Gloria.
Gloria Valez:
When you do a system fix, you agree on Monday…
Pat Pungitorie:
Usually what happens if we determine there’s a
system fix, we try to propose a work around. And then depending upon when we
can get it scheduled to get it fixed, and then usually we send out some sort of
industry notifier to advise all CLEC’s of the issue.
Gloria Valez:
Okay, so I’m taking away from this that you really
don’t have any guideline out there in terms of when a fix would be implemented.
Pat Pungitorie:
That is correct. There’s nothing set in stone – it
depends upon the severity of it and if it’s really considered a fix or an
enhancement. But without the particulars of the ticket, it’s hard to discuss that
ticket with you.
Gloria Valez:
Just another question – if there’s no work around,
does that give the situation a bit more priority?
Pat Pungitorie:
It depends. Are we talking about – usually we can
have a work around for any situation. Gloria, it’s hard for me to talk here in nonspecifics when you’re talking about a specific situation.
Gloria Valez:
and… It’s 594711.
Okay.
So why don’t I give you the ticket number
Pat Pungitorie:
Okay. All right, is there anything else? All right, if not,
I hope everyone has a nice holiday. Thanks everyone.
Mike Toothman:
Linda (inaudible).
Okay. I’ll move down to website enhancements with
Linda:
Hi, can you hear me this time?
Mike Toothman:
Yes.
Linda:
Okay, wonderful. Hi everybody, I’m Linda (inaudible),
and I’ve been on these calls now for the last month or two, so I will continue to
provide updates on the website. And today I wanted to cover a couple things.
The first is going to be that sample orders have 7 new directory caption samples
that will be live for the west – I know this is an east meeting, but I wanted to
mention everything. Those sample orders came out on 12/02 and are in LSOG
5.
Also coming out possibly by the end of December or
the beginning or January will be three new east sentrax (sp?) AD9 sample orders
for platform, for migration as is, migration as specified, and new. And again, with
these samples we will also be posting the platform sentrax USOC and SYD
guides. So when you go to the sample orders in the right nav, you’ll be able to
click on those USOC and SYD guides as well. That’s it for sample orders.
For the CLEC education piece of the website, I
wanted to make sure that everybody was aware that we are having the CLEC
ordering workshop tomorrow, that a reminder was sent out through change
control yesterday. If you have not registered, please do so. You can register
through the events calendar. There’s a lot of good information that’s covered at
these sessions, so you really want to register and make sure you don’t miss
them.
Also coming out with the CLEC education team is
some changes that we’re making, as I mentioned previously, to the website
having to do with where the handbooks are located today, and how new
information will be placed on the website. We are starting with some connectivity
information. There will be a connectivity workshop that will be planned and
communicated from a date perspective as to when that will happen. To give you
the information as to what is being moved from where and where it will reside,
and just kind of go over the entire connectivity guide as it exists today, because it
already is out there – we are just making sure that any information that was
previously covered in the handbook is also included in that guide. And that if you
had previously had bookmarks in the handbook, you would know where in that
guide the information would be found. We hope to confirm a date for this at the
beginning of next week at the latest, and information should be coming out to
you.
Also, as we continue to make changes to the website
and continue to enhance content that is out there, we will be basically retiring the
handbook as mentioned previously, and telling you in sessions just like the one
we’re going to do for connectivity, where the information can be found in the
future. So as we’re making these changes, we’ll make sure that you’re aware
and that you can participate in these workshops so that if you do have
bookmarks of or you constantly use the same information for your folks in a
particular place in the handbook, you’ll know where that information can now be
found.
Other information concerning the website – I
mentioned to you last month that we are looking at moving the information that
currently exists on what is referred to as the CLEC support site, also known from
a URL perspective as 128.11.40. All of that information is migrating over to
Verizon.com – this is being targeted also for the very beginning of January. A
notice will be going out once we’ve confirmed all the dates through change
control, and we will continue to discuss the migration as future meetings to make
sure that everybody’s aware of it. But we do want to let people know so that
when they get those notices, and when they do get a redirect page, you will need
to delete your old bookmarks and replace them with new bookmarks because the
URLs will be the new URLs under the Verizon.com site rather than the ones 128
site.
If there is information that is going to stay on the 128
site when we originally migrate over, that information will also be shared at that
time, and schedules for the migration of all the information will be shared.
I also wanted to make sure that people are aware and
using the website and the content that is out there, particularly web based
training. We continuously make enhancements to the web based training to
make sure that it is kept up to date, that it has the latest information in it, it’s up
24 by 7 – we really encourage to have your employees participate in the web
based training. They can take the classes any time. They can take it and stop it
if they need to, and start up again when they have free time. It’s a really good
way to make sure that we reinforce the processes for the different ordering
procedures.
Also wanted to cover one last item on address
validation from a pre-order perspective. We find that there are ordering problems
and sometimes queries back to the CLECs that result because of the lack of use
of pre-order. And not everybody may be aware, but the local ordering guide that
was put out on the website probably around the summer time, it is found on the
online library, has an entire section that covers each of the pre-order
transactions, and it also covers sample orders for each one of those pre-order
transactions. So there is a pre-order transaction sample.
So address validation is one of those things that
seems to be I guess an issue at times because either addresses can’t be
validated or addresses are submitted that haven’t been validated. If you come
across a situation where you are using the pre-order transactions and you
receive a response that is not the response that you should receive, then that
needs to be a WCCC ticket. Otherwise we encourage you looking at these pre-
order transactions and looking at these new samples and making sure that as
you submit your addresses that you are doing your address validation.
If you find that there is an address that is not in they
system while you’re trying to validate it, obviously making sure that it has been
validated either through your sales organization or through the end user, there is
a way to submit an address via the LSR. In LSOG 5 it is the AFT field. In
previous LSOG 4 it was the (inaudible) field, so some of you may be familiar with
that. You can actually use this field to have a new address put into the system.
We also want to make sure that you are aware that you need to fill out the ATN
field appropriately when doing that.
All of this information again will be covered tomorrow
at the CLEC ordering workshop. So again, if you haven’t registered, you can do
so. You can go to the events calendar. The events calendar can be found from
the right nav on the LSP homepage. You can also get to the information and
register via the training and education page, which is in the left nav under training
and education.
And I can give you the URLs if you’re interested for
the local service ordering guide, and specifically for the pre-order samples. So I’ll
just run through them real quickly.
For the local ordering guide, it’s
http://www.22.verizon.com/wholesale/order/local/orderingguide - I copied it
directly – it says 0,7029,4,00.html. The pre-order samples can also be found
again by accessing the local ordering guide and going to the pre-order
transactions,
or
they
can
be
found
directly
at
www.22.verizon.com/wholesale/order/local/samples/preorder.
Is there any
questions regarding any of this information or the website, or…?
Lissa:
can just go into training.
This is the same website as the regular, right? You
Linda:
Yes, I’m just giving specific URLs so you can get
directly, so that all the stuff can be gotten from the main website. Most of the
information can be found on the LSP homepage, either directly in a left
navigation like the training and education stuff, or the events calendar would be
in the right navigation, or the online library, the local ordering guide, can be found
on the online library.
Gloria:
As it relates to the samples for pre-order, do we get to
those via the training site, did you say?
Linda:
No, you get to those via the local ordering guide. So
if you go to the local ordering guide and you, the second option in the local
ordering guide is determine what you want to know about pre-order – actually I
think it says specifically learn about pre-order transaction and responses. And
each one of the pre-order transaction – and this is both east and west – are
covered there. And when you are actually on the page for each transaction, you
will see the sample orders for that transaction, that relate to that transaction. Or
in the right nav or related topics you can also get to all of the pre-order samples
from their.
Gloria:
Okay. I’ve never looked through that material, so in
that material, since you talked a little bit about address about address validation,
do you have any words in there about how your algorithms work when you return
an exact match?
Linda:
Brenda, are you online? I’m sorry, I’m trying to get
some help from one of my pre-order transaction SMEEs, and I think she may
have the same mute problem I had earlier trying to talk.
Gloria:
I couldn’t find anything in the business rules to help
the CLECs understand how you are doing your algorithm. Because there are
many times that you will get back and exact match, but it doesn’t match what you
inputted in because of the way that you do your searches.
Alex:
This is Alex with Allegiance. To clarify that a little bit,
I’ll tell you one problem we ran into a while back and what we learned about it
was when you do an exact match, when you’re putting in the information, let’s
say you’ve got 100 Main Street, and you’ve got that in there and it comes up as
an exact match, but that’s a building that has six floors on it and what you’re
really needing to know is the loc information. You need to know if floor 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, 6, basement, mezzanine, what have you. We were having a little problem with
that and what we found out is you put dummy data in those fields, make up
something that’s not correct, like floor 5,000, something silly like that, it will then
come back and give you a list of the alternatives. And then you can make sure
you’re looking at the right one. Now like I said, on loc information.
Gloria:
I think I understand what you’re saying. I have seen it
where you put in - and I’ve opened up trouble tickets – you’ll put in an address
like 500 John Stitch Way in Trenton, New Jersey. It will come back with an exact
match, but it will return to you 500 Johnson Avenue, Oakley, New Jersey.
Alex:
a different issue.
No, that’s not what I was describing, but that would be
Gloria:
Yeah, and I was just wondering because when I went
through the whole exercise of the trouble ticket, I kind of got at the end of it and
they said to me, well that’s the way that the system works.
Linda:
Well, my understanding is, and I’m going to ask
Brenda to validate this for me, my understanding is the way that the system
returns it to you is the way that you’re supposed to utilize it. So even…
Gloria:
I don’t think so, because I would have ordered service
to a completely different address.
Linda:
So you’re saying the address comes back wrong? I
thought you just said that the address comes back – like sometimes an end user
might think that their address is specific – I don’t know, I can’t think of an
example right now. But when it comes to the actual system records, the address
might be slightly different. It might have a slight nuance to the address that the
customer might think is their actual address.
Gloria:
I understand what you mean, like a slight nuance
would be the thoroughfare – he lives on court rather than way. And you would
return an exact match and you would indicate what the thoroughfare is. My
particular scenario – and we’ve had many of them – is that it’s a completely
different address. And rather than you coming back and giving us near matches,
you come back and tell us it’s an exact match. So that’s why I had asked if there
was any documentation detailing out how you derive and how you come up with
returning back an exact match when it clearly…
Linda:
So basically what you’re saying though is that the
address is being returned as an exact match is invalid, it’s not right.
Gloria:
Exactly.
Linda:
That sounds like a system trouble to me, and I would
think that would be a WCCC ticket.
Gloria:
here. I had no success.
Well, I went that route and I can go on for a long time
Linda:
Okay. I guess I can offer to say that if you have
examples of an address where this has happened, and even a trouble ticket
number, that’s something we can look into internally. But if an absolute wrong
address is coming back, and that’s where we said earlier that if you’re not getting
the response you should be getting and the pre-order information in the local
ordering guide will tell you about the types of responses you should be getting, if
you’re not getting what you should be, then that should be a call to the WCCC
with a trouble ticket.
Gloria:
this information?
You offered to receive samples – how may I give you
Linda:
If you want to go ahead and you can send that to
[email protected].
Gloria:
And put it to your attention?
Linda:
my attention.
And this is Linda, so you can go ahead and put it to
Gloria:
from AT&T.
All right, thank you. This is Gloria Valez, by the way,
Linda:
Okay. Hi, Gloria.
Alex:
One last question or comment Linda would be, and I
know that I guess I’ve requested this before. We’re still looking forward and
excited to see eventually hopefully on the sample orders some orders describing
DID migrations on UNI.
Linda:
You mean the actual sample samples.
Alex:
Yeah, because there’s a lot of confusion out there and
we think that having your examples there to refer would be key on getting all the
NMCs on the same page.
Linda:
saying?
So which was the sample specifically you were
Alex:
DID ordering, so if you’re ordering DID orders for
unbundled facility based orders for UNI, that’d be great.
Linda:
Yeah, we’ll go ahead and make a note of that. I will
let you know that we are looking at – the scope when you think of scope of
complex services, we are looking at adding as time permits, new sample orders
for some the more complex type of orders. But it is a process, and that’s why
we’re announcing them, like the one that’s coming up for AD9. So we do have a
schedule that we’re looking at various products, but I’ll pass that information on
to the sample order folks. Any other questions for me? All right, well everybody
have a good holiday, and I will talk to you in January.
Mike Toothman:
Thanks, Linda. I’m going to move on to Carol Yozza
with LSOG 4 sunset update.
Carol Yozza:
Okay, good morning everyone. As you all know, and
you’ve probably saw my note last week, on Friday the 6th we were in the final
stage of transitioning. We still have a few more months to go, but we’re trying to
get everyone over in advance so we don’t have any pipeline issue. I am in the
process of sending out pipeline files to any CLECs that have queries still in the
system in LSOG 4. It appears that many of them are abandoned or dead PONs,
but we do need, anyone who receives a file, we do need you to confirm back to
us that these PONs are not needed or to take action on any active LSOG 4
PONs that you still have in the system and get them completed as soon as
possible. I want to call particular attention to any LSOG 4 PONs that you have
out there with future due dates beyond January 31st – and this was all in the
notice that went out last Friday. If anything is due after January 31st, we are very
strongly advising that you cancel and resubmit in LSOG 5 so that it will not be in
jeopardy when we sunset the system on February 15th.
And we certainly want to ensure that anything that is
out there gets completed well in advance of the sunset, so we are paying
particular attention to what’s out there in the pipeline as well as the few remaining
CLECs that are still issuing PONs in LSOG 4. That’s basically all I do have, but I
do want to open it up to any issues that anyone has with the LSOG 4 to 5
transition. If there’s any questions.
Gloria:
Carol, this is Gloria from AT&T. Regarding that report
that you have sent out – are you expecting the CLEC to tell you to tell you that’s
it’s okay to abandon these PONs?
Carol Yozzo:
Yes. Actually there will be a few more iterations of
that file coming out, and as we get down towards the end I’ll send you kind of a
formal sign off. I don’t expect you to do it with iteration of the file, but some time
in January as you’re receiving the last of your files I’ll ask for a sign off that
anything that is left out there is not needed and it’s okay for Verizon to purge it.
Our plan will be to do a global purge from our system after sunset, probably
within three months of the sunset – I’m not sure exactly what the date will be.
But be advised though that anything that’s left out there will not be accessible
once we sunset. So even though we will not purge it immediately, it will not be
accessible to the CLECs. So yes, I will ask you to sign off and confirm that
anything left out there is abandoned.
Gloria:
Is that how it was handled, requested a sign off when
we went from LSOG 2 to LSOG 4?
Carol Yozzo:
Yes. It was the same process as for LSOG 2 sunset.
And then Verizon ultimately purged them out of our system.
Gloria:
I wasn’t aware that there was a signature required.
Carol Yozzo:
It was a confirmation that anything left in the pipeline
was in fact abandoned. And I think for LSOG 2 it was a very informal e-mail. I
don’t know if there were any actually hard copy – it wasn’t on paper, it was just
via e-mail. Anyone else? Okay, well we’re well on our way to bringing down
LSOG 4, and I want to thank everybody for their cooperation, and hope you all
enjoy your holidays.
Mike Toothman:
Thanks, Carol. Okay, that brings up down to topic 70,
which is provider notification. Mary Ellen, are you on?
Mary Ellen:
Hi, Mike. I am here. I also have Nancy Pushcar. I
guess there’s – I just want to make sure I clearly define what Nancy and I are
here to discuss because even though I know you call it now provider notification
coming with the February 2003 release, Nancy and I specifically wanted to
discuss the project that we’ve working on with relation to the updating of the
current line loss production process, okay? And I think just to remind everybody,
if some people were not on the call, that some months ago Nancy and I
participated in the change management call and we advised that Verizon was
making some changes to the line loss production process. And one of the issues
here is that there were several type 5’s that had been put in by some of the
CLECs that we wanted to resolve. And in addition we had some differences in
the north and the south. We wanted to bring some more uniformity into the
production process, just to make it the same, that the actual process was the
same.
I do want to reiterate that part of this project, that
there would be no change to the fields that are on the line loss report. There was
no change to the content of the report. And obviously we haven’t changed the
purpose of the report – it’s still to report to you that the end user has changed
local service providers, and this end user telephone number has now been
migrated over to somebody else. Okay? So that’s some of the issues that we
discussed the last time on the call.
We also had originally planned to have the transition
ready earlier this year. We had any time between June and September that we
had originally targeted. We had some very complex scenarios that needed to be
properly worked out and tested and make sure that we were producing a report
that was certainly up to standards that the CLECs expected.
So unfortunately it took a couple of months longer
than we really would have liked, but we are ready to do the transition over to the
new report. And what we have scheduled is we have 5 weekends that we
scheduled in the month of January 2003 and February 2003. And it’s really just
to make sure that the report that you’re receiving is now from the new process
versus the old process.
So if you are getting the report via SVP, EDI, or
Connect Direct, we’re going to work out a schedule with you. Actually we have it
done. We’ll be contacting you separately. I’m sure there are many CLECs who
get the line loss report who are actually not on the call today, but we’ll certainly
be contacting everybody and making sure that you understand that we plan to
transition you and make sure that that fits in with your schedule, and then we will
just provide you any data. So again, it’s not going to be a significant cut over.
We actually – Nancy, we’ve been working with the customers who get the report
via Connect Direct, is that it? To do some testing just to make sure that we’re
synced up. So I believe that’s complete, or is that still ongoing?
Nancy Pushcar:
It is ongoing. We’ve almost completed, we just have
a couple CLECs to check connectivity with, but most of the group is complete.
Mary Ellen:
Okay. So that’s one of the phase, and again, if you
get the report via the FTP file server – I realize that some CLECs actually get it in
multiple fashion, so we’ve tried to accommodate that as part of the schedule, but
there is, if you get the report via the FTP file server, we did, the new report does
have a name change because we are actually sending the old and the new
simultaneously, so we had to actually come up with a new name. And those are
just some of the details that we will provide to you when we contact you
individually. And Nancy, I didn’t know if you had an extra little piece you wanted
to add on some details here?
Nancy Pushcar:
No, specific to the name on the file for FTP and the
successes that we’ve had too with the friendly testing that we’ve done with two of
the CLECs. As Mary Ellen indicated, for the FTP transition into the new
production process, you will see both file names when you go to pull via FTP,
and my team will be contacting the CLECs – obviously the intent is to contact you
personally. Sometimes that, as we know, is challenging with voicemail back and
forth. And we then will make an e-mail contact with you if we’re unsuccessful in
trying to get a live conversation. And then you will have contact points to come
back and touch with my team to talk about the issues that you may have. But
again, you will be able to see both reports until the final release weekend in
February, if you are retrieving via FTP.
Mary Ellen:
I know, Mike, there is another piece of provider
notification that goes into effect with the February release, but it was not part of
this project. And probably Sue Pistaccio has more of the details on that, so I
don’t know if that’s already been discussed. I kind of only joined about 15
minutes ago, so I’m not sure or if you’ll discuss that at a later point.
Mike Toothman:
discussed before.
No, that hasn’t been discussed today. But it’s been
Sue Pistaccio:
And we did for the 73 day documentation, we sent out
what the file would look like with the changes with the other initiative, the provider
notification one.
Mary Ellen:
So I guess at this point I would ask if there are any
questions from the people on the phone call? I’d be happy to answer them for
you.
Lissa:
Sue, this is Lissa. When did that documentation go
out? Or will it be coming out?
Sue Pistaccio:
The update to the file went out with the 73 day
documentation, so when we sent out the note that had the notification for the
business rules, there were several files there at the bottom. The documentation
for the release review for pre-order and order. And then it also has the provider
notification files. That went out the 6 th.
Mike Toothman:
Anything else on provider notification?
Amy:
get contacted?
This is Amy from CTSI. Who do you call if you never
Mary Ellen:
report today?
Amy, this is Mary Ellen.
Amy:
Yes, through FTP.
Mary Ellen:
you know?
Okay. Nancy, do you have a contact for CTSI that
Nancy Pushcar:
I’m looking right now to see if I have it front of me.
Mary Ellen:
while we’re here.
Amy, what’s your number? We might as well take it
Amy:
570-631-3920.
Do you get the line loss
Mary Ellen:
Okay, just in case if we have somebody else, we’ll let
them know that you were interested.
Nancy Pushcar:
Can you say that number one more time, please?
Amy:
570-631-3920.
Mary Ellen:
Anybody else have any questions regarding the
transition from the old to the new production line loss? Okay, thank you.
Thanks, Mike.
Mike Toothman:
about…
Just to clarify on that documentation Sue was talking
Rich Brousley:
Hi, Mike. Sorry, I was evidently placed on mute and
didn’t realize it. Rich Brousley from AT&T. With respect to the provider
notification. Did they leave already?
Mary Ellen:
No, we’re here.
Rich Brousley:
I’m looking at the LSOG 5.4 documentation, the draft.
And provider notifications, and I don’t know if this is an industry definition, but it
states the second line, “notification types may include but are not limited to loss
notification, line sharing notifications, and line splitting notifications”. Could we
amend that? Because in your notification types, which is field 1C, you only list
two, and one is loss notification, which is A, and B is line sharing notification.
And I would anticipate that if you were going to send us anything other then
either of those two, that it would come before the change management before we
would begin to receive any other notifications.
Mary Ellen:
Okay, Rich, remember that what I said is that right
now the project that I was speaking of is only the existing report. So any
changes would be going forward. And I think Mike and Sue and the change
management team would be addressing that.
Rich Brousley:
Okay. And forgive me, because I just hopped on
when you were halfway through what you were doing.
Mary Ellen:
Oh yeah, that’s not a problem. That’s okay.
Mike Toothman:
said…
So Rich, that first part you were reading where it
Rich Brousley:
It said notification types may include – and this is my
problem – but are not limited to. All right?
Mike Toothman:
What are you reading from?
Rich Brousley:
That’s reading from the LSOG
documentation under provider notification, page 371 of 551.
5.4
draft
Mike Toothman:
The one that we sent out? Okay, I just wanted to
make sure you weren’t reading from the actual LSOG produced by OBF.
Rich Brousley:
like to see that change.
No. And this verbiage may come from there, but I’d
Mike Toothman:
So what we show, I think what I heard you say is the
only valid values we show we return are – I believe you said A and B.
Rich Brousley:
Yeah, and one is loss notification, A, and B is line
sharing notification. And yet the verbiage up top defines line splitting notification
also. So I guess – I don’t know if you want to eliminate that or add another
category for it. But my real concern would be, “but are not limited to” verbiage.
Mike Toothman:
So I think Sue can take a look at that.
Sue Pistaccio:
Yeah, I’m trying to get there really quick before we
pass on to make sure I know what you’re talking about, but I think I know where
you are.
Rich Brousley:
call.
And if not, you want my number? You can give me a
Sue Pistaccio:
You’re just talking the description on top of the
(inaudible)? I’m sure I can get this done.
Mike Toothman:
We can clarify that.
Sue Pistaccio:
Yeah, I see it right here. Yeah, we can take that off.
Rich Brousley:
All right, very good.
Mike Toothman:
Okay, I don’t think I finished my thought, and that is
the documentation that Sue was talking about where we compare the old and the
new provider notification – that really went out on December 4 th and it was part of
the document, the subject was “summary of draft documentation for the February
release”. This is where we announced the draft documentation was available
and up on the website. And at the bottom we attached three documents – one of
which was the provider notification comparison on December 4th. Just to clarify
that. Okay. With that, I think that brings us back to Becky King to go over the
updates to the items by release report for November, December, and February.
Hopefully she didn’t have many for November.
Becky King:
I didn’t have any for November. Okay. So we talked
about the one on page 4 of 26, which were the Work Smart USOCs. Basically if
you get the USOC that’s for a main listing and it comes for an additional line,
you’re going to get an error returned. If you send a USOC that’s for an additional
line but it comes on a main line, you’ll get this error returned. Or if there’s less
than three component products from the USOC list between the CSR and the
LSR, you’ll have an error returned.
Okay, the next one is on page 7 of 26, and it’s CR
2719. This is another one that was on the December error codes documentation.
And there’s a typo here. It’s when a SID in the feature detail on the LSR is not
available, the invalid SID will be provided to the CLEC on the error, and it lists the
error there, and the error message.
The next one is on page 8, and it’s flow through or
remote line service on resale requests. And it’s for Maryland, DC, Virginia, and
West Virginia. When the CLEC is ordering RCF, remote call forwarding service
for Maryland, Virginia for resale where the collapsed Express Tract USOCs
existed, the CLEC will tell Verizon what usage package they want by using the
third character of the TOS field, where you’ll tell us that it’s either measured or
message. And there’ll be some new valid entry notes added to the business
rules for it should be the TOS field. And again it’s talking about when it’s
measured or message.
Speaker:
And these changes were included in the material that
was sent out for like LSOG 5, which would be 5.4?
Becky King:
was?
It should have been. Sue, do you know whether it
Sue Pistaccio:
Yeah, it was. You’re on which one, Becky?
Becky King:
It’s on CR 498.
Sue Pistaccio:
Yeah, that one was included.
Mike Clancy:
of…?
Becky, this is Mike Clancy. Why are all of these types
Becky King:
Because they all have to do with flow through.
Mike Clancy:
Okay.
Rich Brousley:
Sue, are there some in here that are not accounted
for in the documentation that went out in the draft of 5.4?
Sue Pistaccio:
Some of them have no impact to the business rules,
but if they did they would have been in there.
Rich Brousley:
Okay. So everything that’s in here is contained in the
business rules, if in fact it impacts them?
Sue Pistaccio:
Yes.
Rich Brousley:
Thank you.
Gloria:
So Sue, on page 8 – this is Gloria – does that mean
that CR 1857, which is the one underneath the one that Becky was just referring
to, it’s flagged as a candidate for February. It’s also flagged that there was no
documentation impact. So am I to assume that if you commit this to February,
we would see no business rule changes?
Sue Pistaccio:
Correct. We have a stronger criteria that have
business rule changes. So the only ones that you would ever see like candidate
this late in the game are the ones that in fact would not have CLEC impact.
Because this one, 1857 is noted as not having a CLEC impact.
Lissa:
Sue, this is Lissa – I see that it’s only impacting
resale, not platform or unbundled loops.
Sue Pistaccio:
497 is resale only.
Rich Brousley:
The one previous that we were discussing also
showed document impact none, but yet my understanding was that it was an
impact. Is that correct or not?
Sue Pistaccio:
Which one are you talking about?
Rich Brousley:
The flow through remote line service on resale
requests. So we’re talking about RCF and the third character TOS.
Sue Pistaccio:
business rules.
It says document impact none – it should say order
Becky King:
I’ll make sure that gets corrected. Thank you, Sue.
Sue Pistaccio:
I should have caught it for you, Becky.
Becky King:
That’s all right.
Elliott:
This is Elliot Goldberg. I noticed there’s like 11 or 12
of these committed and candidates that relate, that are type 2, the follow-up of
Mike Clancy’s question – and they’re all relating to metrics OR 501 and 503.
Does Verizon have any forecast of the gross increase from these 11 or 12 in the
achieve scores on those two metrics? Was this worth putting these up to the
head of the list, or are they going to be miniscule improvements?
Mike Toothman:
We don’t have any really reliable forecast. And we’ve
talked about this in the past and I’ve taken that back, that CLECs would like to
see some kind of impact analysis of a type 2 change request.
Elliott:
Yeah, because basically you, for argument’s sake,
you could have spent 100,000 dollars in coding, developing, and testing, which is
not an unreal number for 10 or 12 changes, and you could get 0.00002
improvement.
Mike Toothman:
I understand you point. And when I’ve taken that
back, the answer I get back is we do some highball estimates, but we consider
them fairly unreliable and nothing that we think is appropriate to share with the
CLECs.
Elliott:
Yeah, but even a highball beats none. And if things
that would have a definitive business impact that we can quantify into dollars are
being held up for these unquantified changes, that are only theoretical at best.
All these changes could affect the gross of, for argument’s sake, 200 times out of
I don’t know how many thousand.
Mike Clancy:
And Mike, a follow-up on what Elliott is saying, many
of these flow through improvements have zero impact on CLECs that do
business like COVAD where we purchase groups to provide DSL service. So
there is a relative impact to COVAD is, and possibly to VATI, are that the
important changes to our business don’t get done, don’t get even scheduled
because these type 2’s take precedence. So what Elliott is saying could be very
marginal and insignificant improvements in flow through.
Mike Toothman:
What we want to do is get to the point that we do
address your significant change requests. So it’s not, we don’t have to worry
about whether resources for type 2’s are impacting delivery of type 5’s. That’s
the emphasis we’re putting on now. I understand your points, and we continue to
push the issue of getting all the type 5’s done.
Becky King:
Okay. The next one is on page 12, and it’s CR 2424.
It’s a type 5, placing trouble ticket via retask when dispatched as required to end
users premises. The description actually is not correct. It should say that will
assign a WAPA commitment time based on the premise access day and time. It
won’t be a new field.
Mike Toothman:
week ago, I believe.
This is the one that Mike Clancy explained to us a
Becky King:
Yup. So I’ll correct this before these go out next time.
Okay, the next one is on page 14, it’s CR 2458. And this phase of the initiative
will improve full and partial migrations from a Verizon resale account to a two
wire analog sub-loop and local number portable migration from a Verizon retail
account to a two wire analog sub-loop. And it’s for the north only.
Mike Clancy:
This is – maybe this is an example of the significant
investment in OSS development. Ostensibly for clients with something that
Verizon interprets as a type 2. And some of the questions that we were asked
when we were kind of discussing on the call last week, all of the pending
changes – how many loops are going to be impacted by that change. I got to ask
the same question on this one. How many CLECs are out there getting rights
away so that they can get the sub-loop arrangement from Verizon?
Mike Toothman:
I think part of the issue though is we have to provide
this in order to conform to an SEC order, probably the UNI remand order. So
even if it’s one, the way we interpret it, we don’t have an option.
Mike Clancy:
I don’t get it. I don’t even think you – I don’t even
know if you can count on one hand how many engineering requests you got to
even analyze the ability to connect at a toe pick (sp) a terminal box.
Mike Toothman:
I don’t disagree with your assessment of the number
of orders, but what happens is someone goes to a commission at FCC and says
I want access to this, and they say it’s part of the UNI remand that Verizon has to
make this access to whatever this is available, and we don’t have an option. I’m
sure we don’t want to do this. And your point that it’s all part of the regulation
that we’re under.
Mike Clancy:
folks.
All right. Just a little feedback to bring back to your
Mike Toothman:
right on this.
Yeah, I’ll ta lk to the product people and make sure I’m
Becky King:
Okay, the next one’s on the same page, it’s CR 2466.
It’s the allow call intercept feature to flow through. For the north, it’s for resale
only. The next one’s on page 15, CR 2519. I hope I understand this one.
Change certain occurrence of a COEE with 134 when the class of service
mentioned is mentioned on the PON.
Sue Pistaccio:
Becky, this is to get change of TNs in the correct way.
So if they’re sending – this is resale change request, if they’re giving us a TN
that’s not on the CSR, that to me would be a change of telephone number, so we
would be looking for the OTN field. So if it’s not on the CSR and you’re not
giving us OTN, we’re going to give you this error message back.
Becky King:
goes out next time?
So maybe I can word this a little bit better when it
Sue Pistaccio:
Yeah. For the title I have change TN request.
Becky King:
documentation, correct?
Okay.
And that would have affected the error
Sue Pistaccio:
account.
Yeah, and you have that was the TN not found on
Becky King:
Right. So I should have also put documentation in
fact is error documentation. Okay, thank you, Sue. The next one is on page 17
– CR 2548. It’s part of the LSOG 6 implementation and the pre-order customer
service record field changes.
The next one’s on page 22, CR 2581. And this is to
flow through a reseller PON when they have a class of service of RUA. And this
is for Virginia only. The next one is on page 23, CR 2614, another type 5. This
is the directory type and the directory quantity fields on the order and pre-order
where they were not matching. With this change, both order and pre-order for
the directory type field will have W will equal the white pages or co-bound white
page/yellow page, and Y will equal the yellow pages. And for the directory
quantity field, it will be zero through 999.
Next one is on page 24, and it’s CR 2644 and also
CR 2697. And they’re both part of the Pennsylvania PAVA. One is for UNI loop
products and services, and the other one’s for toll features.
Gloria:
I have a question on 2644. I notice that the way that
this was addressed was by adding the new field, the TNT field. So I was trying to
go back and find what field that is in the (inaudible) territory of the business rules.
Will someone help me out with that?
Sue Pistaccio:
You’re trying to find out what the field was in former
GTE? So you want a comparison of how you did it in the old way compared to
how you do it in the new way. That’s something I could work on with Ed Amotto,
who did some of the documentation for that. But I can take that back.
Gloria:
Because I didn’t see, Sue, a TNT field in the GTE
rules. You have a field called – never mind. I didn’t see any field at all that was
sort of comparable to this TNT field. I was a little bit confused when it says here
to provide the same level of flow through for the former GTE Pennsylvania hot
cut. I would have thought I would have seen a similar field.
Sue Pistaccio:
Let me just see in my write up. It may be, because I
know that in former GTE they have a coordinated conversion which matches our
hot cut process. And then they have the hot coordinated conversion. What I
have for a comparison is their coordinated conversion, which is like our hot cut,
they do not populate the CHC field. And on the hot coordinated conversion they
do. But what I can do is I can get more detail and explain how they do it as
compared to how we do it.
Gloria:
And how will I get this information?
Sue Pistaccio:
What do you mean?
Gloria:
relayed to me?
Once you find some information out, how will it be
Sue Pistaccio:
Are you going to be on the release review call? I
don’t think the documentation went out yet. I think we were scheduling it – I can
cover it there. I can also have them send something out through change control.
I think we were looking to do the release review, maybe it was like the 18th or
something. So we would be getting into detail on all the initiatives again.
Gloria:
If you happen to have this information sooner, it would
be much appreciated if it could be distributed sooner.
Sue Pistaccio:
I can do that. I’ll find something out and what I’ll do is
I’ll talk to Ed Amotto because he was doing a lot of this stuff for PAVA
specifically, so I’ll see how he wants to distribute it, but I’ll do it as soon as
possible.
Becky King:
Okay, the last one is on page 25, and again it’s CR
2698, and it’s for the PAVA Pennsylvania optional calling plan. And those are all
the new ones that I have for this month.
Mike Clancy:
Becky, I just want to acknowledge your service to this
group, and acknowledge your patience with us over the years. There was a
period of time that I’ve been participating in this call. And I wish you the best in
your retirement.
Becky King:
Thank you very much, I appreciate that.
Lissa:
I think we all agree with Mike, and best of luck, Becky.
Mike Toothman:
She’ll be back this afternoon, don’t (inaudible).
Becky King:
When the real fun starts.
Mike Toothman:
She gets hard to live with if you… So that concludes
what we usually take care of in the morning. Unless someone has some other
items that we could talk about. Do we want to go ahead and take a lunch break
now then come back to do the prioritization in the afternoon?
Joyce Perry:
Mike, just one thing. Gloria?
Gloria:
Yes, Joyce.
Joyce Perry:
Do you want to bring up – I know we sent it to
Joanne, but do you want to bring up that CSD issue with Sue and Becky so they
can answer that for you?
Gloria:
were breaking up.
I didn’t catch the actual issue, I’m sorry Joyce, you
Joyce Perry:
The call forward basic, with the 1 plus 10 dialing?
Why don’t you bring it up?
Gloria:
Sure. To refresh my memory. I think a while ago
Verizon sent out notification for like the New York City area will be going to be
going to the plus dialing. So if you’re dialing someone from, if you’re originating a
call from 212 and you’re dialing someone within 212, now we’re going to have to
dial the full 10 digits. So we had a question regarding if you’re doing a platform
order, it happens to be ordering the feature of call forwarding and you now need
to provide the call forwarding to number, do we have to include the 11 digits?
Like 1 plus then the 212 number, as an example.
Sue Pistaccio:
Gloria, I know we checked with product management.
That came into us I think through Joanne’s group, the query came in and they did
check that when you do process those requests, you put in the numbers the way
they would be dialed. So when you fill out that information in the feature details,
you should be putting the 1 plus.
Joyce Perry:
And when will that be effective, Sue?
remember? Is that February 2003?
Do you
Sue Pistaccio:
I don’t remember when – we said that the notification
went out. I don’t have that information handy.
Lissa:
That went through via the industry letter – was that
how it was sent out? Or was it sent out through change control, that notification?
Lewis:
This is Lewis from Deset – there was a letter sent out
th
November 19 about the New York City 10 plus 1 dialing reminder. This notice
is a reminder that starting February 1, 2003, mandatory 1 plus 10, yada, yada,
yada.
Lissa:
So we should be able to find that on the website,
right? Where they usually post the industry letters?
Mike Toothman:
the embedded base?
Yes. At the risk of putting Sue on the spot, how about
Sue Pistaccio:
That’s a question that is still being investigated. I
don’t know if they’re running something to update it or not, or if it has to be
changed on change orders. I know that was like a two part – we looked into how
it would come in new and we were looking to the impact to the embedded base.
So that’s still outstanding, Mike.
Mike Toothman:
Okay.
Gloria:
order?
Does it look like possibly maybe looking for change
Sue Pistaccio:
What do you mean? I don’t think you would have to
change it. I think the thing, I couldn’t imagine that. Let’s make the customer take
that out. I think there were two options – either they would run a job on it or
when a request came in to change it, it would have to be updated then. I don’t
really know how they’re doing it. It was under investigation, Gloria. I know we
have the question pending with you, but there seems to be some other interest in
this, so I will look to see if it’s appropriate to have maybe a notification go out no
exactly how it’s going to be handled.
Joyce Perry:
Okay, we can break for lunch.
Mike Toothman:
This is the afternoon session where we review new
CRs and prioritize them. Miss King, are you going to lead us through this?
Sam:
Just a minute, she’ll be right with you.
Mike Toothman:
Well get her over there, Sam.
Sam:
it is.
She’s retiring at the end of the month. You know how
Mike Toothman:
I figured she’s already gone.
Becky King:
Okay, are we all here? Okay, yesterday there were
some additional material distributed. Did everybody get those? Okay. All right, I
guess we had some left over from the last session. CR 2701 was yours, Lissa.
And I being told that we were advised that the CLECs could upgrade their
systems to handle these bills or use their existing access.
Lissa:
Yeah, but it’s not a system issue. So I don’t know
who put the status on here, but that’s not what the issue is. And so I’m going to
pass on this, and I need to get back. I need to work with Tim Burkhart. I haven’t
been able to talk with him because of my busy schedule. So this status is
irrelevant to our issue.
Becky King:
Okay, I’ll make that note there.
Lissa:
And I’d like to have that removed.
Becky King:
Okay.
Mike Toothman:
So, Lissa, you want to hold this over, you said?
Lissa:
Yeah, I’m going to probably set up a special meeting
with Tim to find out what they can do, so I can explain to everyone on the call.
So yes, please.
Becky King:
Okay. The next one that we had was for the preordering CORBA update, and I have not gotten an answer back from the
connectivity team. They referred it on to IT, of whether we go to a newer version
whether CLECs on the older version still would be able to operate with us.
Mike Toothman:
But we’re going to address this as a connectivity issue
right now, as opposed to having it prioritized – that’s kind of what we feel.
Becky King:
That’s what we said last month. So I guess I should
just remove this, or leave it until we get some kind of resolution?
Tom:
Becky, this is Tom. We had this same issue come up
in the west last month. Connectivity management was to contact those that use
CORBA and make individual notification of the need to upgrade their tool staff.
And they were going to add it to the upcoming pre-release conference call for the
February release. So the solution in the west was to address it in the pre-release
call, but it definitely is a connectivity issue and we had the connectivity folks
along with the CLEC test environment folks online to help explain it and to…
Becky King:
Okay, so were we upgrading the system?
Tom:
Yeah, it’s like installing the next version of a browser.
Becky King:
version.
Right, so Verizon was going to install the upgraded
Tom:
We have to and the CLEC also has to on their side.
Becky King:
All right. So the answer of whether someone with a
lower version could operate with us…?
Tom:
I believe that answer to be they cannot. And there
was the need to do this is associated with an intermittent error associated with
one of the transaction types. So it’s sort of fixing a problem that if you’re
experiencing the problem, you probably are already working with WCCC and
others to address.
Gloria:
for February?
And is Verizon going to implement this new version
Tom:
Yes, that’s my understanding in the west.
Mike Toothman:
We don’t know what we’re going to do in the east yet.
Becky King:
Okay, thank you Tom. Okay, the next one is a type 4.
Karen Borg are you on the line?
Karen Borg:
Yes, I just came back on. That is 2715. Okay, what
we were asking here was for the presence of both the switch silly and the RT silly
in the loop qual extract. And we’re asking for this change to eliminate some of
the false positives and negatives being experienced. Today, if the file is named
by silly for a CL location where DSL isn’t deployed, the file is considered not
qualified. And then on the other hand, some of the wire center files are named
for the host switch, and include remote switches where DSL is not available, and
that would be causing the false positives.
Joyce Perry:
Mike, you understand what she’s saying?
Mike Toothman:
Karen, I’ve been asked for clarification. In the extract
today, it’s only returned an 8 digit silly. And that doesn’t give you, as I
understand it, the information down to the remote terminal location. So we’re
getting back indications that DSL can not be provided to this end user location,
but in reality it could be through remote parts or whatever other product, and
access a remote (inaudible). And so by adding the 11 digit silly, you’ll be able to
provide DSL to more locations because you’ll know that this location is DSL
capable at a remote terminal.
Joyce Perry:
And so can we do this 4 line splitting?
Mike Clancy:
I don’t think that’s what Karen requests. Because we
already have – part CR came up in the west and in the east, and parts is going to
be indicated as parts in the extract. I think what this is related to, and I put in one
of the CRs that I put in that we’ll be going over today is, I think, the same thing,
where I am asking for improved loop qual information related to remote switch
units.
Karen Borg:
Actually, if you look at the expected output section of
this CR, what we’re really asking for is for two new data fields per record in the
extract to identify the switch silly and the RT silly where applicable.
Mike Clancy:
So if the switch silly is an 11 character silly, you can
assume it’s a remote off of a host switch, or does the 11 character silly just show
up instead of DS0, DS1, DS2 – it shows up as RS0, RS1? Which would be an
indication that it’s a remote off of a host and I think the issue there is that D slams
located in the host DO, you can’t get DSL out of the remote, because your D
slam (sp?) has to be co-located in the remoted CO as a loop qual that’s generate
needs to be coming out of the remote CO rather than the host CO. In other
words, what conditions as the terminal from the CO should be measured from the
remote CO, not the host CO. So it’ll come up as the distance is okay and would
appear to be qualified because for example, a base IPO in Queens in the white
stone CO in Queens – white stone was collapsed into bayside switch, but the
white stone CO is actually like a DLC in an environmental vault. So there’s no
co-location there, I don’t think there’s any space. But when you put in the
telephone number, it qualifies off of bayside switch, but out of the white stone CO
because the address served is at a white stone. So it comes up as qualified, but
you can’t line share because the dial tone’s in bayside and the loop’s in white
stone. Get what I’m saying?
Mike Toothman:
Yeah, I think.
Mike Clancy:
So your splitter would have to be a white phone, but
there’s no CO to put the splitter in.
Mike Toothman:
DSL?
So what would you have to do to be able to serve
Mike Clancy:
You would have to have parts – even with parts it
wouldn’t work, based on the way parts was 0(inaudible), although Verizon
yanked that tower. So I don’t know how it’s going to be provided. But in that
instance, even parts wouldn’t work, Mike, because you can’t co-locate out of a
white stone CO because there’s no CO to co-locate at. So basically the only way
people get broadband service in white stone is from Time Warner or Cablevision.
Mike Toothman:
Oh. The upside of this CR, is it not that we’ll be able
to eliminate what we’re calling false positives, but will we also be able to qualify
more addresses? In other words, eliminate false negatives.
Mike Clancy:
Well if you go under the TN, it’ll come up as qualified,
but it’ll be a false positive. If you go under the address, it should come in as not
qualified.
Mike Toothman:
By having this information, we should be able to
provide DSL to more end users than we do today.
Mike Clancy:
Or you should minimize bad volumes that go to
Verizon on orders that can’t be fulfilled. So what you do is you increase the
percentage of orders that can get fulfilled after they’re qualified. Kind of like flow
through, so that makes it type 2, right?
Tom:
So, Mike, that means we don’t have to rate it here, we
can just go to implementation?
Mike Clancy:
I think you call it a type 2 and implement the baby,
only do it on mine, because then it’s a CLEC initiated type 2.
Becky King:
Are there any more questions for Karen?
Gloria:
I just wanted to confirm, since I see here that it’s
mentioned, as far as the interface goes, that it’s CORBA, EDI, and the GUI. So
when you’re referring to the CORBA, I’m assuming that the transaction that we’re
talking about is the XDSL loop qual transaction. Just want to confirm that, thank
you.
Becky King:
then. Allegiance?
Any other questions? Okay, let’s go ahead and rate it
Speaker:
Pass.
Mike Clancy:
Do we have to rate it? It’s a type 2.
Mike Toothman:
I think we should call it a 4 for now, Mike.
Becky King:
2. AT&T?
Yeah, let me leave, then you can change it to a type
Gloria:
4.
Becky King:
Broadview? Cavalier? Choice One?
Speaker:
We’ll give it a 4.
Becky King:
COVAD?
Mike Clancy:
5.
Becky King:
COX?
Speaker:
Pass.
Becky King:
CTSI?
Speaker:
Pass.
Becky King:
Met Tel?
Elliott:
4.5.
Becky King:
Talk America?
Speaker:
Pass.
Becky King:
Vartec?
Dexter:
Pass.
Becky King:
WorldCom?
Lissa:
Pass.
Becky King:
Zetel?
Speaker:
Pass.
Becky King:
Quest? CCI? Deset? Is there anyone I missed?
JR:
pass on that.
Yeah, JR with Global Telecom. Actually I’m going to
Becky King:
Okay. Anyone else?
Claudia:
pass.
Yeah, this is Claudia from McGraw.
Becky King:
Thank you.
Kathleen:
we’re going to pass.
This is Kathleen with NOS Communications, and
Diana:
4.
This is Diana from Metro Teleconnect. I’ll rate it as a
I’m going to
Becky King:
Anyone else? Okay. I have Allegiance, pass; AT&T,
4; Choice One, 4; COVAD, 5; COX, pass; CTSI, pass; Met Tel, 4.5; Talk
America, pass; Vartec, pass; WorldCom, pass; Zetel, pass; Global Telecom,
pass; McGraw, pass; NOS Communications, pass; and Metro Teleconnect, 4.
Okay, the next one that was held over from last month
was 378408, which we are holding to set up a separate meeting with the product
manager. And the next one is 2731, which we decided last month that it would
be handled as a type 1, a maintenance issue for the business rules. So I’ll keep
it on here until that’s taken care of. And then on…
Speaker:
care of?
Becky, do you have any idea when this will be taken
Becky King:
No, but I’ll find out. Okay so the next group of CRs
are ones that were sent out yesterday. And it’s the documented dated December
4th, but it was distributed yesterday, the 9 th. And the first one is CR 2545 – Mary
Ellen, are you on the call?
Mary Ellen:
I’m here, Becky. As the description reads, this
initiative provides for the redesign of the retask screens, the trouble
administration screens on the web GUI. The changes will have no impact on
overall functionality, meaning the transactions that are currently supported will
continue to be supported, and there are no new transactions. The URL will not
be changing. We will make changes to the business rules to be in sync with the
revised interface. And fundamentally what we’re doing here is providing better
navigation and a more efficient process for creating, modifying, and tracking
trouble tickets. I guess I would describe the approach the that they’re taking as
kind of scenario driven. So if you were going to submit a trouble ticket for a POS
line, and you selected type of line prefix equals P, all of the fields that you would
need to submit that trouble ticket for the POS line would be presented to you in a
very orderly and user-friendly fashion. And the same would apply to the other
scenarios – type of line prefix equals, S, T, M, what have you. And that type of
philosophy would also apply to the other transactions like trouble ticket modified,
trouble ticket inquiry, et cetera.
Mike Toothman:
It’s my understanding these screen redesigns have
been covered with representatives of various CLECs.
Mary Ellen:
That’s correct. Our maintenance and repair staff had
have a couple of user forums with the CLECs, both from a requirements
perspective and then kind of a show and tell of a prototype.
Alex:
to need this?
What was the root cause from Verizon’s perspective
Mary Ellen:
I think it was two things. I think suggestions for
enhancements have been coming for some time, and we just saw the opportunity
to improve the interface and make it better to use, and also to return better
information back to the end users about their trouble tickets or trouble reports.
Alex:
So you were having no problem previously in
receiving the retask information?
Mary Ellen:
I don’t want to say there was never a problem.
Trouble tickets have come and go about things about the interface.
Alex:
But on a routine basis, it functioned pretty well the
way it was, as far as that. In other words, you’re not going to get any
enhancement on your side to help you flow this information better yourself?
Mary Ellen:
Well I think certain things.
There are certain
enhancements on existing fields. For example, if you’re going to enter a circuit
ID anywhere, the interface is set up so that it will guide you for entering the
correct segments of the circuit, because I know some people think our circuits
are kind of just difficult to get used to, but there are little enhancements like that
to help the end user more accurately. So yes, I could say they are
enhancements.
Mike Toothman:
And I think that’s the key, Alex, is that this new
design, if I can call it that, will eliminate some of the problems that users are
having in using the system, and reduce calls in to the RCNC, and just make
everything more accurate, as Mary Ellen said.
Alex:
That’s kind of where I figured you were going, but it
didn’t sound like that was the case. This sort of sounded like we’re just going to
pretty it up and I just didn’t think that made sense. So I appreciate the
clarification.
Mary Ellen:
efficient.
I think it does look better, but it is actually to be more
Becky King:
Any other questions?
Mike Clancy:
Is this depending on the service type when a CLEC
opens up retask and puts in service type, certain fields get highlighted and others
get kind of dimmed, or…?
Mary Ellen:
It’s not really highlighting. I think it’s just presented in
a more orderly fashion so that things are not overlooked. Certain information will
be carried from screen to screen so that it’s always present, you don’t always
have to go back and look for something. The required fields still remain required
and what have you. And having that notification is still there, we’re still using the
red, yellow, green situation. But I think the organization of the screen is better.
There’s not as much scrolling involved, it’s a more compact look.
Mike Toothman:
I think we have to be up front with this, the reality is
there is actually a beta test underway on this.
Mary Ellen:
There’s hopefully going to be one in December
through January. At the last user forum, volunteers were solicited and our
maintenance and repair people are working with a handful of CLECs to negotiate
their participation in the pilot. But I don’t know who they are just yet.
Alex:
So this doesn’t add any additional functionality other
than clarifying the information that’s placed on a request? This is to allow any
additional tracking and reporting?
Mary Ellen:
doing currently.
No, it does not.
It’s to improve doing what you’re
Mike Clancy:
Not to be completely facetious, but does this improve
flow through on trouble tickets?
Mary Ellen:
I hope it would.
Elliott:
It’s a type 2.
Becky King:
You could go work for Verizon. Okay, are there any
other questions? I guess we can vote on this then. Allegiance?\
Speaker:
4.
Becky King:
AT&T?
Joyce Perry:
4.
Becky King:
Cavalier? Choice One?
Speaker:
5.
Becky King:
COVAD?
Mike Clancy:
5.
Becky King:
CTSI?
Speaker:
5.
Becky King:
Met Tel?
Elliott:
4.
Becky King:
Talk America?
Speaker:
4.
Becky King:
Vartec?
Dexter:
4.
Becky King:
WorldCom?
Lissa:
4.
Becky King:
Zetel?
Speaker:
4.
Becky King:
McGraw?
Speaker:
5.
Becky King:
NOS Communications?
Speaker:
5.
Becky King:
Metro Teleconnect?
Speaker:
4.
Becky King:
Did I miss anyone?
Speaker:
GTB – Global Telecom Brokers. 4.
Becky King:
Anyone else? Okay, I have Allegiance, 4; AT&T, 4;
Choice One, 5; COVAD, 5; CTSI, 5; Met Tel, 4; Talk America, 4; Vartec, 4;
WorldCom, 4; Zetel, 4; McGraw, 5; NOS Communications, 5; Metro Teleconnect,
4; and GTB, 4. Okay, the next one is…
Alex:
Can I ask one more question about that one? I hate
to do that, but I want to revisit that real quick. Is there anybody on the call that’s
in the trial that can tell us kind of how they think it’s going? Because if you’re
taking an approach of doing it order scenario by order scenario approach, has
anybody noticed that pigeonholes certain ordering type or a trouble ticket where
you can’t place a ticket for a certain problem that you previously could? You see
what I’m saying?
Amy:
We’re a part of the beta, but they haven’t actually
started up anything yet. We’re just in the preliminary stages right now, so I can’t
answer any of your questions. Maybe later I can, but…
Alex:
Okay, well thank you.
Becky King:
Okay, the next one is another type 4, CR 2617, and
Marry Ellen, can you address this one as well, please?
Mary Ellen:
Sure. This initiative requires the increase of the stat
code field of the trouble ticket enhanced status inquire request response from 3
to 7 characters. And the reason for that is, again our maintenance and repair
staff did a very thorough review of the trouble type codes that we have stored
internally in our table and our returned on trouble admin transactions, and it was
determined that we had some obsolete ones that we need to get rid of, and some
needed a little bit better description, so we’re updating some of those. And a few
new trouble type codes are being introduces, and that is what’s driving the
increase in the length of the characters. That’s your why. The new trouble type
codes are 7 characters instead of the original 3, but I can tell you that they’re
very specific so I guess that’s the reason for the expense to 7 characters.
Mike Clancy:
workshops?
Mary Ellen, was this one of the things discussed in
Mary Ellen:
I don’t think so.
You mean the user forums I mentioned on the last…?
Mike Clancy:
Can we put this one on hold and get a sense of what
those new codes are going to be?
Mary Ellen:
I can give you an example of a code if you want. I
can’t say that I know why this is going to be returned, but I can give you an
example of, for example, one of the new codes is going to be VFY-DO, which
means dispatch out returned. And that right there is 6 characters.
Speakers:
What was that code again?
Mary Ellen:
V for Victor, F for Frank, Y for yodel hyphen D for
David, O for Otto. And that is dispatch out returned.
Laurie Anne:
You said these are status codes, right?
Mary Ellen:
Trouble ticket codes. If they returned in a stat codes
field, but they’re trouble type codes.
Laurie Anne:
right?
This doesn’t have anything to do with resolution,
Mary Ellen:
No.
Mike Clancy:
Is the goal to reduce calls into the RCMC related to
status or on trouble tickets?
Mary Ellen:
I think that’s part of it, to explain them better so
perhaps they’re not as hard to understand.
Alex:
For my obtuse brain, could you tell me what the total
goal is, how this fits in to the bigger picture?
Mary Ellen:
This is basically a housekeeping effort, if you will, that
someone suggests we had a look at these codes for a long time, let’s see what’s
in our tables and our databases. And they did find some redundancy and some
that were not as clear as they should be, so we took the opportunity to clean
those up and also to introduce a few of these new codes – I think there’s about
half a dozen trouble type codes.
Alex:
And I guess you had to expand the number of
characters, and that’s why you need it.
Mary Ellen:
Right. Up to this point we always returned just 3
character codes. Now there’s a couple that are 6 or 7 characters.
Lissa:
are going to be used?
Would it be possible to get a list of all the codes that
Mike Clancy:
I think what would be helpful is maybe to have
someone from the repair team on the call to explain what they’re looking to
accomplish. Because my experience with that particular group in Verizon is that
they’re pretty thorough and usually when they’re looking to develop stuff there’s a
real good reason for it, other than housekeeping. So I think it may be valuable to
have someone on the call to explain in more detail, and a couple CLECs now
have made a request to give us a list of the codes and maybe what they’re going
to mean. It’ll kind of give us a better idea of how to vote on this, because
housekeeping might not be a high priority.
Mary Ellen:
Maybe housekeeping was not a good choice of words
on my part, but it was an effort to review all the trouble type codes. Apparently
the codes are also being cleaned up for our repair centers. In their screens they
have a little pop up that gives them a list of the all trouble type codes, so the
updates are going to be both in the repair center and in retask, in the LSI.
Mike Clancy:
Right, so the documentation that we’ll be using will be
updated and explain what these are. But in terms of – is it a unilateral effort?
Like we’re going to do this update and we’re going to add these codes? Is it a
unilateral effort or have they actually conversed with CLEC counterparts and
come up with codes that the CLECs and Verizon have decided would be useful
in communicating through some electronic media what’s being communicated via
dialing telephone numbers and having phone conversations today? So if it’s
unilateral, then we’re going to get a portion of that cleared up. If it isn’t, then it
might be worthwhile to have a little workshop and develop these codes on an
industry-wide basis with Verizon and the industry providing input into the codes,
so that you can get a full set of codes that are more meaningful and to go at this
once rather than Verizon takes a shot at it and then the CLECs come back and
say, “ooh, you know what would be neat?, we need to have this one additional
code”. And then the next thing you know, you have to put in a CR to get one
additional code, while this is an undertaking in process that could actually could
take care of that right now.
Mike Toothman:
I think Mike raises a good point, but I also think – am I
right, Mary Ellen? – that they’re trying to get this done in February.
Alex:
The question really is (inaudible), why exactly are
they doing it? I guess if we better understood the benefits, that’d be pretty
helpful, you know. I’m still a little in the dark, myself.
Gerald:
I guess that my question was, is this more for Verizon
or for the combination Verizon/CLEC benefit?
Mary Ellen:
I would think it’s a combination.
Mike Toothman:
I don’t know what I’m doing talking, cause I don’t
know, but it seems to me it’s to provide more definitive information about the
status of the trouble. Therefore, as Mary Ellen just said, probably to both our
benefits.
Mary Ellen:
Mike, to your point, I do think these new codes are
based on an industry standard. I didn’t participate in selecting them or
developing them, but I don’t think it’s anything that was kind of just nice to do.
I’m sure there was something driving it.
Mike Toothman:
But we don’t know what discussion has taken place
between Verizon repair folks and CLEC repair folks about this. So that’s
something we need to get back. But for full disclosure, we’re about ready, or
maybe we’ve already sent out business rules for repair for February – probably
last week – that already reflect this. Isn’t that true?
Mary Ellen:
That’s correct.
Mike Toothman:
So if you look at the business rules that went out last
week, you’re going to see that this field is now 7 characters.
Mike Clancy:
Does it have a list of the new codes?
Mary Ellen:
There is an appendix in the business rules, appendix
K, which has been updated and does reflect the new codes.
Mike Toothman:
I guess what we’re saying is we should have brought
this to you earlier. It somehow got under our radar, but I just want to make you
aware that they are looking to actually do this with the February release.
Gerald:
business rules.
I’m hearing you say it’s already been done in the
Mike Toothman:
change and the values.
Right, the business rules reflect the 7 character
Laurie Anne:
So is this already a done deal in terms of…?
Mike Toothman:
We can always stop it.
Laurie Anne:
Has it been developed already?
Gerald:
It sounds like it has.
Mike Toothman:
At this point I don’t know if they’re finished
development, but I would say they’re well on the way.
Laurie Anne:
now?
I guess the question is why are we voting on this
Mike Toothman:
I think we’re a little bit remiss for not bringing it to you
earlier. I’m not sure exactly how this got by us. So I don’t know. If you don’t
want to vote, we don’t vote. That’s fine.
Mike Clancy:
My experience of the group that are behind this is that
they communicate regularly with their counterparts in the CLECs. So I don’t
know that this hasn’t – yeah, did not follow process, did it not follow procedure –
that could be in fact what happened in terms of change management. But in
terms of communication with the industry, there may have been and I know there
has been a couple of workshops, and I know part of it was to discuss the issue
before this, but I know that there’s formal and informal communication by that
organization, in particular with the people in COVAD that do maintenance. So I
don’t know that this hasn’t been communicated with the actual operating people
and there hasn’t been communication to and from the CLECs about what this
enhancement should look like. So I would prefer not to vote on it at this time. I
want to go back to my folks and find out, number one, are they aware of it and do
they understand it? Are they ready for it? And if there has been communication
by Verizon to COVAD’s maintenance people, I’m not going to have an allergy to
voting on it.
Mike Toothman:
So let us go back and talk to our folks and see – we’ll
provide a list of the new codes, I guess already in the business rules, and we’ll
talk to our folks and see what communication’s taken place. And we’ll send out
something through change management hopefully end of this week, early next
week to give you more information about this.
Mike Clancy:
That’ll work.
Mike Toothman:
This frankly is not the first time we’ve had a little bit of
a gap with the repair folks. They’re good folks and they’re working hard, and we
do communicate, I just don’t know how once again we missed this one. But
that’s something I’ll work on.
Gerald:
all parties.
It sounds like a good way to go if it’s going to benefit
Mike Toothman:
Okay, we’ll do that. We’re not going to vote – we’re
going to get more information, send it out in a notice and see what we find. If
that’s okay. So with that we move on to the Clancy triad.
Becky King:
2771.
Right. The next three are yours, Mike. The first one’s
Mike Clancy:
You want me to read this one, or…?
Becky King:
Or just explain.
Mike Clancy:
There have been a number of CRs recently that were
discussed and yanked, but I don’t think they were yanked for the right reason.
So basically this is COVAD’s attempt to clarify what was requested or what
COVAD thought was requested by them. Basically this is a request to add
additional information to the bulk pre-qual data. And when a CLEC uses the bulk
pre- qualification information, we’d like to see third party voice provider, UNI P,
existing DSL line, or (inaudible), and intel voice line indicated on the bulk prequal. Today they’re not and as a result, we create bad volume because the loop
actually looks like it’s qualified for the line sharing, but it’s not. The order is sent
to Verizon and then rejected. And Verizon rejects it either with third party voice,
or not qualified for DSL, or already has DSL, or pre-existing DSL, or some reason
like that. And the result of not having the qualifying flags in the bulk loop prequalification pool is that CLECs submit orders for loops that basically are
unqualified, and that defeats the value of bulk pre-qualification. So Verizon
works on orders that shouldn’t be processed and the CLECs are charged for
service orders that cannot be fulfilled. Now, the last part of that I’m not certain
about. I think Mike and I had a discussion. He’s saying that as long as the
service order’s done written and you get a reject, you’re not charged.
Laurie Anne:
But you’re still utilizing your resources to key orders
that aren’t going anywhere.
Mike Clancy:
Yeah, we’re still using resources. Not only that, we’re
creating customer expectations that can’t be fulfilled, because the customer
thinks they’re qualified for DSL, and they’re not qualified by dint of Verizon
business rules, not by dint of the actual physical characteristic of the loop. So
this is a business rule changing the physical characteristic of a loop without
putting anything in the loop database saying by dint of the service provided on
this loop, it’s no longer qualified for sharing. So, the business rule is the
qualifying factor.
Mike Toothman:
So you’re looking for discreet flats- one for UNI P, one
for existing DSL, and a third for resale voice? As opposed to just one flag saying
not qualified for line sharing?
Mike Clancy:
See the problem with the not qualified for line sharing
Mike is if COVAD has a line splitting partnership and it’s pre-existing UNI P, well,
it is qualified in the instance where that partner is the voice provider. Now, the
other side of it is if it’s pre-existing DSL, what that’s going to prompt is a
conversation either by the ISC or if COVAD is selling this directly, by COVAD
with the end user to the end user saying, “you already have DSL – you realize
you can’t add two DSL lines on a single voice line?”. And they might say
something, “I know I have DSL, but I don’t want that DSL anymore, I want your
DSL” – meaning they’re being LOA and I process a migration order. So they’re
qualifying factors, and based on the qualifications, I have to do something else
with the order.
Mike Toothman:
Mike and I have had extensive discussions about this
whole subject, and I just need to give you the Verizon point of view as we discuss
this, and that is this information – third party voice provider in existing DSL – is
CP&I information, which we’re not allowed to release. And that’s just the point of
view from Verizon. And the other point of view is the loop qual extract is to tell
you if there is a, if that address is capable of getting DSL as opposed to giving
you information about the service that’s on that loop. So we’re pretty much of
different opinions here on this subject. But before we considered this further, I
needed to provide the Verizon point of view. That’s why Mike said that we jerk
some of the Vadi requests out there, and that was that CP&I reason.
Speaker:
But Mike, we didn’t actually cancel those.
Mike Toothman:
I know you didn’t, but we didn’t put them in.
Mike Clancy:
I figure I’ll just keep writing them until you relent.
Mike Toothman:
Clancy’s trying to wear us down.
Joyce Perry:
So what are we saying here?
Mike Clancy:
Verizon’s position is that the information that I’m
requesting here is customer provided network information which is a protected
information that Verizon…
Joyce Perry:
Can somebody mute their mike or something –
they’re breathing very hard. Thank you.
Mike Clancy:
Joyce, what Mike is saying is this is customer
provided network information that is a protected class of information and it’s
protected by federal regulation, and in some states by local regulation. And
Verizon is concerned that if they put it in the bulk loop qual extract, they then
create a database of CP&I information that they can’t protect. Is that it Mike? So
COVAD doesn’t believe this is CP&I information, and believes it is information
that changes the qualification of the loop for shared services. And if it’s not
present, it creates bad volume and it creates false customer expectations. The
only time we look at it is when we get a request for DSL on the loop.
Alex:
The way I’m reading you here then based on their
argument, let’s say hypothetically devil’s advocate position is I want to abuse this
information. I want to use this in an unscrupulous manner. So I guess what I’m
doing is I’m looking at the bulk extract and I’m going in there and I’m saying give
me all addresses that are DSL qualified in this town, or whatever. And it comes
back with a big list, and I look and I say now I’m going to sort which ones of these
are third party voice. Okay, now I’m looking at a list of customers – it may not tell
me who the third party voice is, but I know these people made a choice to go to
an alternate provide, and then I assume I can market my guys to say if they
made that choice once, then they might want to do it again and maybe we can go
and sell to them. Is that kind of what they’re saying?
Mike Toothman:
That’s one scenario. But you can do some of that
today with the loop qual extract. You can use it to determine what DSL loops are
qualified or what addresses, and go after those guys. It’s really not intended to be
a marketing tool.
Alex:
I’m trying to figure out how it can be unprotected and
used in an unprotected manner.
Mike Clancy:
Let me clarify how we use the information. We get
this information as a bulk extract, so we get a data file. And it has telephone
numbers in it, addresses in it, and it has loop characteristics in it. And it tells us
that the loop length is whatever the loop length is, it might tell us that the loop is
loaded, and it has certain characteristics – it might say that it has DLC on it and it
might say that it’s a (inaudible). So all those things are different kinds of media
that Verizon uses to provide voice service. So I take that information and I put it
into a data format that I use and front end to my wholesale partner. When they
access the telephone number, they get either a red flag which means it’s not
qualified for DSL – and I probably shouldn’t be telling you this because Vadi’s on
the phone. Anyway, they get flags that say qualified, not qualified, or might be
qualified. So if I had this third party voice, it might be qualified, because it might
be a line splitting partner which means the wholesale ISP would then has to look
on a table to see what voice providers have line splitting agreements with
COVAD and then ask the end user who’s the voice provider. And they say ABC
CLEC – good, you can get line sharing, I’ll process your order. You’re a DEF
CLEC, you’re not on the list, so this loop’s not qualified for line sharing.
Alex:
So then are you requesting that one of the things
placed in the extract be the information about which CLEC is providing the voice?
Mike Clancy:
No. What would be presented in third party voice, yes
or no, which would prompt a maybe out of my system and a look up table that
says might be qualified, third party voice, here’s the look up table, ask the end
user who the voice provider is. If it’s one of these, process the order. If it’s not,
it’s not qualified.
Alex:
That enhances your ability to discriminate against
those loops in a more efficient manner.
Mike Clancy:
It permits me to qualify the end user or not.
Mike Toothman:
And avoids having to send in an LSR that we’re just
going to reject. I understand what Mike’s trying to do, it’s just our concern is a
legal one.
Mike Clancy:
Right. Verizon’s concern is they have responsibility
for what they consider to be (inaudible). And COVAD’s belief is number one, this
isn’t CP&I. Number two, it’s a qualifying factor doesn’t change the physical
characteristic of the loop, but it does change whether that loop is qualified or not
for the service that COVAD provides. And changes what kind of order we should
place dependent on the result. So let’s for example consider line splitting.
Suppose you’re a line splitting partner with COVAD or with some other DSL
provider and every order that your partner issues or you issue gets rejected
because it’s a third party voice line. Oh by the way, it’s your third party voice line.
You are the third party voice partner. Doesn’t matter. That loops gets rejected
and it doesn’t get processed because it went in as line sharing when it is in fact
line splitting, which requires different boxes and fields on the LSR have to be
filled in. So as voice carriers win more of the market from Verizon, less of the
market can be seamlessly served for adding data, whether it’s COVAD’s data or
their own data, because even that is line splitting. And the end result is the
orders all fail and get rejected.
Mike Toothman:
I think we know the positions. Maybe at this point we
should vote, but I do have to caveat that I might come back and say what I just
said is it’s Verizon’s position that we can’t implement the type 5 because of legal
reasons. But is that the thought of the group that we should go ahead and
prioritize it and let me come back and be the bad guy, or what?
Joyce Perry:
Mike, you want it voted on?
Mike Clancy:
issues are.
Yeah, why not. Let’s vote on it and consider what the
Becky King:
COVAD?
Mike Clancy:
5.
Becky King:
Allegiance?
Laurie Anne:
5.
Becky King:
AT&T?
Joyce Perry:
4.5.
Becky King:
Choice One?
Speaker:
4.
Becky King:
CTSI?
Speaker:
4.
Becky King:
MetTel?
Elliott:
5.
Becky King:
Talk America?
Speaker:
Pass.
Becky King:
Vartec?
Speaker:
Pass.
Becky King:
WorldCom?
Lissa:
4.
Becky King:
Zetel?
Speaker:
Pass.
Becky King:
McGraw?
Speaker:
Pass.
Becky King:
NOS Communications?
Speaker:
Pass.
Becky King:
Metro Teleconnect?
Speaker:
4.
Becky King:
GTB? Okay, is there anyone I missed?
Speaker:
COX is a pass.
Becky King:
Okay. Anyone else? Okay, I have Allegiance, 5;
AT&T, 4.5; Choice One, 4; COVAD, 5; CTSI, 4; MetTel, 5; Talk America, pass;
Vartec, pass; WorldCom, 4; Zetel, pass; McGraw, pass; NOS Communications,
pass; Metro Teleconnect, 4; and COX, pass. Thank you. Okay, Mike, you have
the next one as well – CR 2772.
Mike Clancy:
And this in lieu of having the previous one, this gets
through some of the CRs that have been submitted previously that Verizon’s
indicated would be difficult to resolve. And the one’s I’m talking about here, and
Karen you should be familiar with these, because you submitted them, where the
CLEC industry was requesting the ability to put orders in parallel in the
provisioning system. So for example, there’s a retail order pending where the
end user has requested a move, and a CLEC wants to make sure that the shared
portion of that loop moves too so they process an order after the end user calls
them telling them they’re moving on this date, make sure my data is there. So in
order to have that successfully completed, the request before was let me put in
an order on top of an order that already existed. And Verizon’s come back and
said a couple of times that that may not be possible to do.
What is possible to do is to get timely updates made
into the bulk loop qual extract and therefore into loop qual is someone’s using
LSI to get access to the information. And basically this would be providing
updates to the bulk loop qualification database in real time. So if something
happened and it goes through a provisioning process and goes through there’s a
process that has the bulk loop qual be updated with that information. So in other
words it’s seamless, not like it has to wait for a refresh.
Mike Toothman:
The bulk loop qual extract is only produced weekly,
isn’t that right? So you’re not asking for a mid week update, are you?
Mike Clancy:
I think I’m asking that it be linked to the systems that
are updated so you wouldn’t need a refresh.
Tom:
report?
So you’re asking for a full time interface rather than a
Mike Clancy:
Might be. I know that Bell South today has an API,
and I’m not sure that it’s a bulk loop qual extract they’re going through, but
there’s an API that’s accessed and the information is all there.
Mike Toothman:
So you’re asking that the loop qual transaction that
you access through LSI or CORBA, or EDI will have this information as well?
Mike Clancy:
So it would have current information. Let’s say you
can’t get that parallel process in one time, let’s assume that. And I’m trying to
process an order – I know the customer moved, they’re telling me they moved,
they’re telling me their phone service is up and running and I put that TN in and it
qualifies to a different address. Do I get an address validation problem in the
pre-qual transaction?
Mike Toothman:
I’m not sure pre-qual.
validation problem if you submitted an order.
You might get an address
Mike Clancy:
I’m going to get, number one, that the loop doesn’t
qualify to the address the end user’s saying they’re at. Now do I lie and put that
through your system as qualified?
Mike Toothman:
At the new address? I don’t know. I would, but do
what you want. I was just kidding.
Mike Clancy:
Except in testimony, I think my company’s been
accused of doing that. Not by you, that’s correct.
Mike Toothman:
Let’s hold those thoughts for a second, and let me
back up a second to talk about another subject that’s kind of related to this. I just
came to know recently that if you have a phone number in and working for a
couple years and that customer requests to add call waiting and we issue a C
order to add call waiting to that line, then until that C order’s completed, that
phone number is not returned in the extract. And that’s something I’m trying to
get fixed, because I don’t think that’s right. Is that you’re understanding, Mike?
Mike Clancy:
Yeah, and you can’t qualify the loop.
Mike Toothman:
So I’m trying to get that fixed basically on a trouble,
because I think that’s crazy.
Mike Clancy:
Let’s say you do get that fixed and I process and
order to that qualified address, and that C order is still pending, what do you
think’s going to happen?
Mike Toothman:
It’s not going to get rejected. That’s a retail order.
Mike Clancy:
It is. Pending activity on the account.
Mike Toothman:
But it’s retail pending activity and we don’t reject
LSRs on retail pending activity.
Mike Clancy:
You do on an outside move.
Mike Toothman:
You changed scenarios on me. So do you think it’s a
good or a bad idea that I get that phone number…?
Mike Clancy:
I think it’s a step in the right direction. Now, to solve
the other problem, somehow either timely updates have to happen in bulk extract
or parallel activity has to be permitted, or we have to come up with a better idea.
So does anybody else have a question or does everyone understand what I’m
asking for here – 2772?
Mike Toothman:
I guess just to get back to it, Mike, just to make clear
that today we produce a loop qual extract once a week and you’re not asking for
that to be produced any more frequently. You’re asking when we do that extract
that these types of activities by properly reflected in that extract.
Mike Clancy:
Everything that happened the week before –
disconnect, connect, outside move, whatever it was is updated in that new
extract. Including that they ended up being a UNI P provider. So that could
happen in a couple of days where there’s a migration, but that following extract
after that activity has completed should show that it’s now UNI P or if it migrates
back, whatever it is.
Mike Toothman:
And I think it does, right, if it completed the previous
week. How about if I have a pending order that’s date due Monday, and we run
the extract on Saturday and that pending order is say making a third party voice
– would you want that reflected in the extract? I’m sure you would.
Mike Clancy:
So what’s going to happen is the following week it’s
going to be UNI P, so when I’m using that new extract, it will be UNI P. So why
not have pending activity either reflected in the extract or updated as it’s
complete? Is there any way to have the pending activity reflected, even some
kind of pending flag or something?
Mike Toothman:
Because my understanding when there’s pending
activity against a phone number then it’s marked pending in live wire.
Mike Clancy:
And does it disappear from the extract?
Mike Toothman:
Yeah, and that’s what we’re trying to get fixed with
this C order thing. But say it’s a pending new connect, is that reflected in live
wire? I don’t know if the pending order activity is…?
Mike Clancy:
No, pending isn’t there.
Mike Toothman:
So I don’t know how we would get it available in the
extract. We don’t need to debate it here…
Mike Clancy:
How about you hold this one until that question gets
answered? How is pending activity reflected in live wire? And that would make
sense to vote on it after we know that answer.
Mike Toothman:
Okay.
Becky King:
Okay. The next one’s your too, Mike.
Mike Clancy:
Is Sam on the phone? Sam told me – I tried to get
back to her, but we never hooked up. Sam left me a message saying this one
was like another one.
Mike Toothman:
I think she’s relating it to that C order problem that I
was talking about. And this may go further than that.
Mike Clancy:
Okay. This issue came up in the cut – 2773.
Becky King:
another one, right?
And this is the one Pam said she thought was like
Mike Clancy:
Sam said. And this came up in the CLEC user forum
and was discussed there. And I worked with John White and Bob Brand, who
works for John, on developing this change request. Now the problem is that
loops came back as DLC and COVAD processed the orders using manual loop
qual, and 30% of them got fulfilled. Meaning 30% of them had copper as well.
So John and I had kind of a back and forth on this and John said you kind of like
end up dealing with the law of diminishing return – over time, as you add DSL
and line sharing, less and less of the copper would be available, until there’s no
copper available. So that kind of generated this request.
Basically what I’m asking for here is in the loop qual
database verify all loops that disqualify today as DLC be reviewed to determine
that they may also have copper facilities available. Meaning copper facilities
available to the terminal. Show those loops as DLC and copper. The CLEC can
then perform and LMU to determine if the working loop is copper or DLC and
take appropriate action. In other words, if I go into loop qual and it comes back
as DLC and copper, that would prompt me to do another transaction call, go in to
the LMU and ask on a PN basis what’s the LMU of the loop make up for the TN
I’m trying to make line sharing and line splitting. And the end result would be
either telling me that loop’s on DLC or not.
The loops that have DLC and copper in the terminal
identify copper as loaded, and if it’s loaded provide loop length for the loaded
copper loop. Now the reason for that is Verizon offers a service called digitally
designed loop where the CLEC can ask that the load coil be removed, at a cost.
So loops that have DLC and copper and the copper is not loaded, provide the
loop length of the copper loop. Because if it exceed 18 kilofeet, it’s not qualified
for DSL.
For loops that are DLC only, identify them as DLC
only, which would mean don’t put an order in or put an order in for an ISDN type
loop. For ISDN capable DLC indicates DLC only, ISDN capable. So basically it’s
to take what comes back in bulk loop qual extract today, anything that comes
back with DLC to review all of those terminals and if there’s copper available in
that terminal, note DLC and copper, and if that copper’s loaded, DLC and copper
are loaded. If it’s not loaded, DLC and copper not loaded, X kilofeet. And if it’s
DLC only, indicate it’s DLC only. And if it’s ISDN capable, DLC ISDN capable.
Gloria:
When you indicate under here under the process it’s
pre-order in the bulk loop qual, where you also thinking that within the pre-order
process it would be associated with the Verizon XDSL loop qual transaction?
Mike Clancy:
transaction.
Yeah, where it says system LSI – that is the loop qual
Mike Toothman:
So it’s LSI, EDI, CORBA, right.
Gloria:
So if you’re talking about CORBA, there’s two loop
qualification transactions – one is called loop qualification and the other is called
XDSL loop qual. I’m assuming that on LSI, they also present to the two flavors of
loop qualification.
Mike Clancy:
The things I’m asking for here would be specific to
XDSL type transactions because in all cases, every one of these loops would be
qualified for voice. So no matter if these were added or not, these loops are still
qualified for voice, unless it’s IDLC, which I believe is already in the transaction.
Gloria:
Mike Toothman, from a Verizon perspective, the loop
qualification transaction that this would be associated with would be the one
that’s titled XDSL loop qual.
Mike Toothman:
Correct. Now we talked about this some on I guess
the call last week. And in February you’ve already voted on this CR and it’s
sitting in there for February. To add two new reason codes coming back to get
the sum of what Mike’s looking for – one, it will indicate if it’s DSL and copper is
available – but that’s only to get those values available to be returned. The
actual work to go into the database and update the database to say there is
copper also in this terminal, that’s work that people are trying to get done in the
March/April timeframe. So part of what Mike’s looking at, we’re already
underway. What’s not underway are things like if it’s loaded or not, loop length,
and that kind of stuff. Just so you’re aware.
Joyce Perry:
So we’re ready to vote?
Becky King:
All right, let’s vote then. COVAD?
Mike Clancy:
5.
Becky King:
Allegiance?
Alex:
4.
Becky King:
AT&T?
Joyce Perry:
5.
Becky King:
Choice One?
Speaker:
5.
Becky King:
COX? CTSI?
Speaker:
4.
Becky King:
MetTel?
Elliott:
4.5.
Becky King:
Talk America?
Speaker:
Pass.
Becky King:
Vartec?
Speaker:
Pass.
Becky King:
WorldCom?
Lissa:
5.
Becky King:
Zetel?
Speaker:
Pass.
Becky King:
Teleconnect?
McGraw?
Speaker:
4.
NOS
Communications?
Metro
Becky King:
Is there anyone on from COX? Anybody I missed?
Okay, I have Allegiance, 4; AT&T, 5; Choice One, 5; COVAD, 5; CTSI, 4; MetTel,
4.5; Talk America, pass; Vartec, pass; WorldCom, 5; Zetel, pass; and Metro
Teleconnect, 4. And those are all the new CRs for this time.
As Mike said, this is my last meeting, so I want to
wish you all a happy holiday, and I’ll turn the call over to Mike.
Joyce Perry:
you.
Happy holiday to you, Becky. We’re going to miss
Becky King:
Thank you. I’m going to miss all of you too. Okay,
I’m turning it back to you, Mike Toothman.
Mike Toothman:
Is Elliott still on?
Elliott:
Elliott is still on.
Mike Toothman:
That didn’t sound like your voice when you were
voting. Was that you voting a minute ago?
Elliott:
me off.
Yeah. Sometimes I change my voice so you won’t cut
Becky King:
But he uses his signature 4.5.
Mike Clancy:
Mike, Elliott told me that when he called back in a 1
o’clock he said he was Mike Toothman so he wouldn’t be put on mute.
Mike Toothman:
That’ll get you far, using my name. Elliott had
submitted a proposed metric on timeliness change request implementations to
the carrier working group, which is the metrics group. And it’s my understanding,
Elliott, that that was kind of pushed to this meeting, saying it should be discussed
at change management.
Elliott:
I don’t know if it was pushed to this meeting, but it
was sort of referred to you for your comments. I modeled it after the Bell South
metric, but I put our timelines in there. And I think it’s a great idea because I
think it does sort of - I think it was 58 weeks or something. But what it basically
said was, give or take 58 weeks from the time prioritization, a change should be
installed.
Mike Toothman:
Your metric proposes I think four milestones – one at
20 weeks, 38 weeks, 54 weeks, and 87 weeks.
Elliott:
I forgot which one I sent you, if you want to know the
truth. I wasn’t prepared to talk about it because I didn’t have it in front of me.
Mike Toothman:
That’s what I was getting ready to say. Do you want
to talk about this now or would you prefer that we set up a separate call?
Elliott:
I don’t care. I can talk about it a little bit now, and
then if anybody wants to go back and research it, they can. We’ve got a half
hour.
Mike Toothman:
like Laurie Anne has.
Folks on the call, have you guys seen this? It looks
Elliott:
Anybody who has a carrier working group rep should
have. I can send it out to this group, if you want. Basically what it is is a tiered
approach to getting things implemented and measuring how quickly they are.
Because we’ve had this ongoing discussion about the timing of change
implementations and how some of them seem to drag on forever. And what
this’ll do is measure and sort of quantify and assure that once a change is in it’ll
progress to it’s conclusion. That which is measured happens.
Mike Toothman:
type 5’s.
And you want to measure type 4’s separately from
Elliott:
type 2’s.
Seems like a good idea. I agreed not to measure
Mike Toothman:
You can imagine, we’re not thrilled by this in that it
might drive different behavior. And we just don’t like to measure something just
to measure something. So I don’t know how much we want to get into this now
or we need a separate call, or…
Elliott:
You see, Mike, it goes back to the longstanding belief
that there are type 5’s that hang in there forever.
Mike Toothman:
And there are some older type 5’s, but you reference
Bell South. Bell South has the ability to refuse to accept the type 5 based on
economic reasons or not viable, and I think Quest has that in their agreement –
I’m not sure about SBC. So we don’t reject type 5’s, we take them in.
Elliott:
You just don’t do them.
Mike Toothman:
Right. So is it better that we should start rejecting the
type 5’s, saying this is going to cost too much to do and it’s not economically
viable?
Alex:
What’s the difference. If you examine it and reject, or
actually not accept it versus accept it and say the same answer, it’s not a viable
(inaudible) to implement based on costs associated with it, it’s still the same
answer. So to tell you the truth, I do think we do need a separate call for this,
because I don’t know if half an hour’s going to be enough to go through it,
understand it, propose any additional language to it, et cetera. But it makes
sense – accountability drives performance, period. And Mike, I know that we’ve
discussed this previously quite a few times, and you haven’t had the opportunity
to really show results from the last time that we really stepped here to examine
all the change requests. But, that’s still one reason this is out there. If you can
turn things around and get things implemented as rapidly as you say you’re trying
to do so and there’s such a great impetus to get it done, then maybe this isn’t
necessary. But otherwise accountability will drive performance.
Mike Clancy:
Can I ask a question about – I’m not certain, I’m not a
student of change control process by ILECs. John Broshear will become familiar
with both Verizon and Bell South because of the way we’re reorganizing. He’ll
have change management responsibility for both of those. But someone else will
have Quest and SBC and Sprint. So the question I have is based on what Mike
just said, I’m assuming Bell South is doing a business case analysis on each and
every type 5 that they receive, in terms of how much it’s going to cost to
implement. Now, cost analysis is a great thing, but usually when that’s done in a
business case, it’s done with the juxtaposition of the benefit and an evaluation or
assumption of benefit. And if the costs exceed the benefit, then that’s a cost to a
business. Does that mean that Bell South rejects it because it costs more than
the benefit? Is that how it works, does anyone know?
Peggy:
They may do that analysis, but they never give to us.
They just say no, the cost is too high, we’re not doing it.
Mike Clancy:
And they may not even assess the benefit then, they
just say the cost is too high. So I don’t know I want to give Verizon the ability to
do that.
Peggy:
I kind of disagree with you. If they’re never going to
do it, I’d rather know that we’re not going to do it.
Alex:
That’s the concern that I had is number one, and you
can measure both ways. If they decline to accept one, you can still demonstrate
that in a proceeding. Just hear the number change requests that they decline to
accept based on cost versus let’s say if you wanted to do the same thing today,
you can say it was brought to change control and voted on and it still wasn’t
implements. There are your two choices.
Mike Clancy:
I know I have a bunch of outstanding CRs, and there
were some – I think it’s noted on the document now – that they’re on hold. And
basically the request from Verizon to COVAD is how big is this issue? Which to
me goes in the direction of cost benefit, right? Verizon is thinking of a bona fide
request of a CLEC that’s put in a change request saying is this going to be
impactful, is this going to be of benefit? In other words, is there some positive
economic value for me to spend this money to have this happen? And if I go
back and demonstrate that there is and it’s significant for my business, then I’m
going to ask that those be taken off hold and move forward. But I think if we
bring maybe that kind of rigor into the process where it’s not just an evaluation of
cost but an evaluation of cost and benefit, then that’s a different story. And in my
experience, business case analysis always take the form of cost benefit analysis.
Peggy:
Mike Toothman, are you saying Verizon in exchange
for measuring this, would want the ability to reject change requests? Or are you
just tossing that out there as a concern of comparing Verizon to Bell South?
Mike Toothman:
Just throwing it out there.
Peggy:
Elliott, I’m not sure why we need this to be a metric.
This seems like the kind of thing that we can measure on our own. We know
when these things are requested and we know when they go in, so we can keep
track of them and if we have a problem, we can take them to the state
commissions. Is the theory that if Verizon has to report these things every
month, they will be more apt to perform well or get them sooner?
Elliott:
I have been intermittently tracking these things for
well over a year now, and I know Claudia did for AT&T before I took it on. And
these type 5’s get positively ancient. And basically what happens is we have a
situation like I mentioned this morning where there’s a huge amount of other
categories and type 5’s just sort of get pushed by the wayside, and we only have
three releases a year, and there tends to be very few type 5’s so the list just
grows.
Peggy:
But is there a way that we can get at the problem
without creating more metrics?
Elliott:
I don’t know. And so far all of our attempts to resolve
the underlying issue seem to go nowhere – and I’m not disparaging Mike’s
comments about making an honest effort on type 5’s, but the bottom line is
there’s always something that pushes the type 5’s out of the way.
Mike Toothman:
Elliott, I don’t want to debate it now, but I’m not sure I
agree with all your statements about type 5’s becoming ancient and they sit there
and grow. I think the number of type 5’s have decreased in the last year or so. I
don’t look at the aging as close as you do, but my recollection is that only a
couple are more than a year old.
JR:
I’ve asked a couple times for some people to get back
to me so I can become a little more educated, but aren’t type 5’s on a higher end
to do? Or are they at the lower end of thinking to do?
Elliott:
Neither. They’re just CLEC initiated.
JR:
be done immediately?
Okay. So a type 1 would be something that needs to
Elliott:
No.
Alex:
They’re really more categorical than anything else
than prioritized in the way you’re examining.
JR:
I guess my concern and what I would say is if you
know that something is that far behind that hasn’t been discussed for a while,
maybe we should have a time set aside to look at those that are six months are
older, determine their value, and move on. If it’s not going to take place, then we
need to vote and say let’s get rid of it and move on to something that’s going to
be of more benefit.
Elliott:
No, see the problem is you get type 2’s which are
regulatory requirement fairly close to the top of the list, and some of them are
quite marginal in terms of complying with that regulatory requirement. So if
anybody’s going to do a cost benefit on a type 5, then Verizon ought to say we’re
doing these 12 that are going to increase the achievement on metric 503 by
0.06%, and then lot’s have a benefit analysis there too. And what I’m saying is
some type 5’s have a real impact on some of our businesses, and they don’t get
done because they get pushed to the back because there are other categories
that may or may not be properly used that are going to the head of the line, and
this proposal for a metric was designed to force a flushing out of all those issues.
And then nothing can go to the head of the line unless it should.
Alex:
I think we tried to address some to the aging situation
with change requests by at least Mike Toothman making a greater commitment
to cover anything that has not been rated or that has been rated and is not
moving anywhere on each call. Mike, isn’t that right?
Mike Clancy:
And we also took an effort December 3rd, was it?
Where we reviewed everything that was pending, to see are these things still of
value and should we still continue to have them on the change management list.
Now some of those are COVAD requests that are on hold based on COVAD
having to do an evaluation and get back to Verizon with some kind of benefit
analysis. And I understand that if resources are going to be applied to that and it
doesn’t have any material impact on my business, or some significant impact on
my business, then it’s just kind of a nuisance thing. For example, if Mike
Toothman asked me, “do you want me to add those qualifiers in bulk loop qual
extract that right now (inaudible) in terms of being legal or illegal or whatever
versus this other one that you have on hold? And would you take this one that’s
on hold and get rid of it if I did that one?” – I might get rid of it because that one
might be more important to my business. But I think what Elliott’s raising here is
we don’t even do that. So in terms of accountability, who’s accountability is it to
make that choice. And to Elliott’s point, if everything else is a type 2 and has
insignificant incremental improvement to flow through, is it still a type 2?
Alex:
There’s one other comment I’d like to make about the
whole metric issue – and I’m not against a metric necessarily, but I don’t know if
it’s warranted at this time. But what we do know is that throughout all of last
year, definitely the second half of last year, there was an unsatisfactory pace of
implementation of change requests through change management, especially
those type 5’s. So we need to make sure that pace does not remain
unsatisfactory. And Mike Toothman, you’ve said you are committed to making
the next year of implementations increase so we don’t have the backlog of type
5’s. So maybe there’s another way to approach this without a metric per se, but
maybe there should be a minimum number of change requests that get done in
any release, and even a minimum by type. I think we can probably have another
call to discuss this, which is really a change management rules examination and
enhancement, rather than going to the metric. But if that doesn’t work, we can
go to a metric. My other concern is if we place a metric out there, we are dealing
with Verizon that, despite claims in the media, still has very deep pockets that
can decide that if their metric states that they get 58 weeks to implement
something, they’re going to take 58 weeks and we can just wait the maximum
amount of time each time.
Mike Clancy:
Mike just through something out in the beginning, that
Bell South has another process. Can I make a request and adding to what Alex
is saying, because I think the objective here that Elliott is trying to achieve is
some certainty that type 5’s are going to get done. On it’s surface that metric
and you have the situation where I in particular for COVAD am looking at some
of the one’s I put in. Does that mean that the clock on that 58 weeks stops while
I’m looking at is, and is that a sub-metric? If we look at this as an opportunity to
redefine or recommit to a process, then I think Alex’s suggestion that we get
together in a workshop type forum and figure out how to make the process better
might be the way to go. But what I would like to hear from Verizon is number
one, if this metric were to be put in to place, what changes in the process would
Verizon look to create? And in lieu of this metric, what changes might Verizon
make to the process to get to the objective of proposing the metric? Does that
make sense to everybody? And maybe we can come together in a workshop
and bring our own ideas on how to tweak the existing process and make it better.
Mike Toothman:
One thing I would like to emphasize is last week I
gave you my true assessment on where we are on these type 5’s, and outside of
2-3 that were relatively new, every other type 5 I was trying to get done in June,
except those I don’t think we’re ever going to do, and where I said I recommend
we cancel them. And then there’s some I said we need to get more justification.
So frankly at this point I think I’m working every type 5 that we intend to work.
Lissa:
And hopefully that will be the standard, Mike. You did
an excellent job of responding to that, because at least we know where that
particular change request is slated for.
Alex:
That’s right. And I think that what you’re hearing here
is simply a little frustration based on the previous timeline that we have seen for
quite some time.
Mike Toothman:
lot of good stuff in June.
I hate to write off the whole year. I thought we did a
Becky King:
Let me give you a little perspective on the CRs, just
going over them quickly. We have two that are still open that were initiated in
2000, 10 initiated in 2001, and we had 27 initiated that are still open in 2002.
And by the end of December, we will have implemented 27 type 5 CRs for 2002.
So we haven’t done as well as we can, but we did better than we did last year.
And we don’t have huge amounts left that are terribly old.
Elliott:
But we also talked the other day about canceling stuff
just because they were old. And in a more rational world they wouldn’t have
hung around, they would have been implemented when they were needed.
Alex:
Elliott, I hate to say this, but ultimately cut and dry is, I
think we need to see what some of these releases are going to end up being.
See what happens to February and continue to monitor the situation to see if it
gets better. But I think a workshop on how we prioritize and package for
released change requests has merit as well.
Elliott:
With all due respect, this is like talking to Iraq about
whether or not they have weapons of mass destruction and are avoiding
inspection. We think things are bad, but we really don’t know, but we’re going to
give them another chance. How many years of analysis do we keep going and
saying we’re going to go on and on and keep looking at it.
Mike Toothman:
I don’t see it as bad as you are characterizing it.
What piece of functionality is urgent for your business that has been sitting
around for two years?
Mike Clancy:
Third party voice flags in the loop qual extract. That
one we have a difference of opinion on.
Alex:
We all need to commit to being on this call to cover
everything that’s outstanding, every time we’re on this call so that we know
where it is and where it’s going to go. If it weren’t for last week’s call where we
pretty much did that piece of it, I would think we need to do that on this call every
time. Then we get a better sense as we go of whether or not things are
benchmarked in the right direction or not.
Mike Clancy:
Alex, rather than – this is the departing
representative, so take it for what it’s worth – rather than do it every month, it
may be worthwhile that prior to the release, so that would be three calls a year
where the focus is where is the CR in the realm of possibility. So that we have
those kind of frank discussions at least three times a year, and maybe the action
items that come out of that is the CLEC has to go back and look at the request
and come up with a different way of requesting it that it becomes a possibility.
These calls last pretty long as it is. These calls to lay out what the requirements
are, to have the requesting CLEC or Verizon share with the other members of the
industry why they’re making the request, and what’s in for everybody else type
kind of conversations that kind of flesh out what these CR’s are and have give
and take between CLEC’s and the ILECS on what thing are and what other
things might be in existence to accomplish this same goal.
Peggy:
It seems like you’ve told us you’re going to do
everything you’re going to do by June and the rest (inaudible). You’ve asked the
CLECs to go back and see if they’re still important. But it seems like we need a
process for figuring out what happens to those, if they’re not going to withdraw
them or change them and you’re not going to do them. There’s no point in just
measuring them. What happens?
Mike Toothman:
The only way we cancel a type 5 is if the originator
withdraws them. I think it’s Quest who has a deferred status. So do you want to
try to get a call together before the first of the year, or is that going to be too
aggressive.
Lissa:
I recommend after.
Mike Toothman:
How about Tuesday, January 7th? Okay, what time
you want it set – 10 to 3 again? Okay. We’ll just put that time aside. And I’ll
send out the metric and I’ll try to tee up the meeting, just what we hope to
accomplish, to see if we’re together. All right. Bye.