The MCI/WCOM fiasco is not a non-issue for NN. Quality of Service is being demanded by irate customers and MCI/WCOM will have to find a way to deliver. I've heard from a reliable neutral source that NN's systems are being considered. I have to think their negotiating position has improved of late.
Here's the latest press:
(Online News, 08/20/99 04:43 PM)
MCI customers deride compensation offer
By Carol Sliwa
MCI WorldCom Inc. executives Monday offered 20 days of free service to up to 3,000 corporate customers affected by its 10-day frame-relay network problems (see story). But many customers said they view the two-for-one offer as a token gesture that won't begin to offset the actual losses they suffered when their networks failed or experienced sporadic outages between Aug. 5 and Aug. 15.
"It's a shallow way of answering this problem," said Rod Taitano, wide-area network manager at San Francisco-based State Compensation Insurance Fund, which intermittently lost its frame-relay connection to 14 of its 28 district offices during the outage.
"We have not accepted that [two-for-one] offer, and we are still reviewing our avenues of legal recourse," said Katherine Spring, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Board of Trade, which estimated that it lost 180,000 contracts during the outage. "It wasn't just the exchange that lost revenue. It was the members and customers who lost seven out of eight days of trading opportunities."
As unhappy as many customers are, they could be getting less. Hank Levine, a Washington attorney whose firm represents more than 50 MCI customers, said the carrier isn't required to offer any credit based on the tariff the company filed with the Federal Communications Commission. Tariffs take precedence over any individual contracts negotiated with telecommunications carriers, Levine said.
Credits Are Limited
Only large companies with aggressively negotiated deals stand a chance at getting appropriate credits, Levine predicted. Others will get the two-for-one credit, and some may consider filing a formal complaint with the FCC. But those complaints can take a year or two to resolve, Levine said.
MCI CEO Bernard Ebbers said there may be certain extenuating circumstances that his company will want to consider for some customers. "But we will handle that certainly on a case-by-case basis. You know, obviously, our objective is to retain our customers," he said.
What particularly irked some customers was the length of time it took MCI to decide to roll back to its old equipment from Murray Hill, N.J.-based Lucent Technologies Inc., which had been in place before the outage began. The frame-relay network congestion occurred as MCI was attempting to upgrade to more scalable, feature-rich Lucent software, but the companies have yet to determine the root cause of the problem.
"It went on for 10 days, and that had a severe impact on a lot of customers," said Bill Bartkus, vice president of information systems at TravelCenters of America in Westlake, Ohio. "I think that was a long time to come to the conclusion that they came to."
Bartkus said his company will ask for a minimum of 20 days of service plus compensation for the long-distance bills incurred when it went to its Integrated Services Digital Network and dial-up backup system during the outage.
The compensation offer "ignores the damage to our reputation and the reputation of our wholesale [Internet service provider] customers, and it fails to recognize small [Internet service providers] that have gone out of business because of this," said Mark Stutz, a spokesman for RMI.Net Inc.
The Denver company's Data Xchange Inc. division couldn't provide service to 66 of its 150 Internet provider customers, and those customers, in turn, couldn't provide service to their customers.
"I think they should really sit down with each and every client and see what they actually lost," Taitano said. "Every client is going to have a different loss factor. Why are you just going to give out a balloon payment of two-for-one? They have to ask themselves: 'Is this really fair?' "
Looking Elsewhere
Noting that his company has had prior complaints with MCI, Taitano said it plans to look at another carrier. Electronic Data Systems Corp. has no plans to move elsewhere because it's a partner of MCI's. But the company is still assessing the effects of the brownout -- which included the sporadic loss of 5,000 of the 16,000 automated teller machines it owns or operates.
"What we're concerned with is 24/7, 365 [days per year] uptime," said Bill Duncan, marketing director at EDS's consumer network services in Morris Plains, N.Y. "We're concerned about our customers. I don't think that token makes up for the hurt they're feeling."
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