NYTimes,8/17: MCI Points Finger at Lucent
August 17, 1999
MCI Points Finger at Lucent for Recent
Network Woes
Free Service Is Offered to Make Amends
nytimes.com
By SETH SCHIESEL
fter one of the AT&T Corporation's big data networks, based on
equipment from Cisco Systems Inc., failed last year, AT&T fully
restored the system in about 24 hours.
After a similar network run by MCI Worldcom Inc., based on equipment
from Lucent Technologies Inc., began having problems on Aug. 5, the
system was not fully restored until Sunday, 10 days later.
In his first public comments on the breakdown, in
a conference call Monday, Bernard J. Ebbers,
MCI Worldcom's chief executive, said that MCI
Worldcom planned to offer each of the as many
as 3,000 customers who were affected by the
problems up to 20 days of free service.
He said it would cost his company only a "very,
very slight downtick" in revenue.
But the fallout for MCI Worldcom, the nation's
No. 2 long-distance communications carrier, may
extend far beyond the next quarterly financial
report.
Ebbers tried to shift ultimate responsibility for the
problem to Lucent, and Lucent -- which sells
MCI Worldcom hundreds of millions of dollars
worth of products every year -- accepted it.
Some of MCI Worldcom's own customers, however, have been scathing in
their attacks on the company. And some analysts pointed out that the
network debacle raised unflattering questions about MCI Worldcom's
policies for handling such situations, especially in light of AT&T's speed in
dealing with a similar problem last year.
Calling the problems "unacceptable" and describing as "hollow" MCI
Worldcom's assurances last week that the problem was under control,
Thomas R. Donovan, president of the Chicago Board of Trade, a big MCI
Worldcom customer, wrote in a letter to Ebbers on Friday: "As a result of
MCI Worldcom's failure to deliver on their promises to me early last week,
the C.B.O.T. is pursuing all available remedies. We have lost all
confidence in MCI Worldcom's ability to provide reliable service."
In yesterday's conference call, Ebbers apologized to his customers and said
any additional compensation beyond the 20 days of free service would be
negotiated privately with individual customers.
But he essentially disavowed responsibility, saying the problem was related
to an upgrade of Lucent's software.
"We do not have a definitive cause of the problem," he said. "That is
something that Lucent continues to work on. Lucent has acknowledged full
responsibility." He added: "Because we do not as a company -- and no one
else in the industry does either -- write software for this type of switch and
network, that it is not something within our power, to determine the exact
cause of the problem."
Ebbers thanked the network experts from Lucent and its Bell Laboratories
unit who worked on the problem, but later in the call he took a serious
swipe at Lucent, wondering aloud whether the company even employed
the right people.
"Part of the reason that there is some
concern here is that there has been a
lot of consolidation in our industry and
this software was originally developed
by Cascade Communications, who
was then acquired by Ascend
Communications, who has since been
acquired by Lucent," he said. "And so
one of the concerns obviously in this cycle of events is what happened to
the people and the process that did the development and wrote the
software. And was the capability to maintain this software retained
through these transactions?"
That might sound somewhat obtuse, but for the telecommunications
industry those are very harsh words. Communications carriers generally
refuse to discuss their vendors at all, yet Ebbers publicly questioned
whether Lucent, which spent $20 billion of its stockholders' money to
acquire Ascend earlier this year, has been managing that deal correctly.
Lucent took the high road, accepting responsibility, as indeed it should if its
software was at fault.
Still, some analysts said that in the end, MCI Worldcom had to bear
responsibility for allowing the problem to continue for as long as it did.
After trying for more than a week to fix the problem (or to have Lucent fix
it) while the network remained online, MCI Worldcom threw in the towel
this past weekend by shutting down the whole system and reloading an
older but more stable software version.
But that raises the hard question of why MCI Worldcom waited almost a
week and a half to make that decision. In one way, the choice was easier
for AT&T because it had an almost complete failure; that allowed AT&T
to limit the length of the crisis by reloading the proper software. MCI
Worldcom spent all of last week betting that it could fix the problem
without shutting down, and it lost that bet.
"When you delay something this long, this is not a vendor problem," said
Frank Dzubeck, the president of Communications Network Architects, a
networking analysis and consulting firm in Washington. "Somebody in the
organization made the decision to let this situation linger. What does the
song say? Sometimes you've got to hold 'em, sometimes you've got to fold
'em. This was a great time to fold 'em, cut your losses and move on." |
