Maverick,
ATT faces T-1 line shortage
By David Rohde
Network World, 2/16/98
Users beware: The seams on AT&T's overtaxed network are ready to burst.
AT&T officials last week confirmed that high traffic demands have used up
the capacity on some of the company's switches and transport routes, and the
carrier is now delaying orders for T-1 access lines in many parts of the
country.
The carrier has ordered account representatives to delay processing T-1
orders in designated "hot spots" until AT&T can provision enough new ports
and circuits to carry the traffic.
The shortages affect access to high-volume outbound and in-bound voice
services, as well as core data services that require a dedicated access line,
such as private lines and frame relay.
The trouble spots are cropping up all over the country. According to
documents obtained by Network World, as of Jan. 20 there was at least one
hot spot in 21 states and the District of Columbia.
An AT&T spokesman said that no orders are being rejected outright, and the
company is working feverishly to provide new capacity under a revised
network plan ordered by AT&T Chairman C. Michael Armstrong.
Chronic problems
But many users are reporting a chronic inability to obtain exact installation
dates from AT&T account representatives.
''We're having a really tough time getting new access lines in,'' said Donn
Greiner, a telecom analyst for United Services Automobile Association, a big
insurance and financial services company in San Antonio, Texas. T-1 access
circuits to AT&T are taking as long as 90 to 120 days to get installed,
especially on the East Coast and in the Pacific Northwest, Greiner said. ''It's
hard to pin [AT&T] down to a due date and even when you do, they still miss it,'' he said.
The vulnerable areas typically do not include the entire state and often change, AT&T officials
noted.
Some users are responding by shifting traffic to
MCI Communications Corp. and Sprint
Corp., both of which say they are not holding
back T-1 access orders.
Last month AT&T told Carl Wood,
communications and operations manager at
Hudson Foods, Inc., that the company ''had
no facilities'' to provide a T-1 access line for
Hudson's Robards, Ky., site. Yet Wood had
previously ordered a 512K bit/sec frame relay
port for the site, and he was ready to ship equipment there. Because Hudson had recently merged
with Tyson Foods, Inc. and Tyson uses MCI's frame relay service, Wood switched the order to
MCI. ''They turned it up in 10 days,'' Wood said.
Likewise, in late November AT&T told Union Labor Life Insurance Co. (ULLICO), a Washington,
D.C.-based insurer, that it had to delay a scheduled T-1 access line installation for an affiliated
insurance agency in Denver. The Denver office wanted the dedicated access line to obtain on-net
rates for ULLICO's Software Defined Network, AT&T's flagship large-business voice service.
But AT&T representatives would only tell Henry Baird, a Seattle-based telecom consultant working
with ULLICO, that they were attending ''weekly meetings at which they decided which orders could
be provisioned.'' The circuit was finally installed two months late, Baird said, after he appealed to
ULLICO's national account team.
An AT&T representative told Wood that T-1 cards are on back order for the carrier's digital access
and cross-connect system, which sits near AT&T's long-distance switches to split out traffic to
different AT&T
services.
''They just don't have enough terminating equipment,'' Wood said.
Other users say they've been told that port capacity on AT&T's core 4ESS long-distance switches
from Lucent Technologies, Inc. is running out.
An AT&T spokesman confirmed that in some areas ''switch hooks'' on the 4ESS are gone. The
carrier is ordering new ports and conducting an ''asset mining'' program to locate vacant ports on the
switches, he said. But the problem is exacerbated by giant traffic demands on AT&T's fiber routes.
Capacity shortage
To reach the switches from AT&T's points of presence, AT&T must inverse-multiplex users' T-1
links up to T-3 and send 48 such circuits over a 2.4G bit/sec fiber path, explained Hossein
Eslambolchi, AT&T's vice president of network operations. ''We have a shortage of OC-48
capacity,'' Eslambolchi said.
To ease the load, Armstrong has ordered AT&T to begin terminating access lines closer to the edge
of the network on switches from merger partner Teleport Communications Group (TCG).
He also has ordered an extensive purchase program for new local telephone and packet data
switches, dropping plans for a big new core switch from AT&T spinoff Lucent.
But that strategy change is coming late in the game. Observers agreed that AT&T put itself in a hole
by ramping up the sale of new T-1 access lines in 1997 to corporate branch offices that previously
used dial-up access for long-distance calls, fax and switched data connections.
''I don't think there was enough coordination between the Business Markets Division and the
networking organization,'' said Berge Ayvazian, executive vice president of The Yankee Group, a
Boston-based telecommunications consulting firm. ''Marketing was aggressively out selling these T-1
access lines at a time when the network people were switching from one platform to another.''
While AT&T sales representatives have been out hustling T-1 access lines, customers complain that
the representatives are receiving capacity-shortage information too late
in the ordering process. ''You get two-thirds of the way into the process and then they come back
and say the facilities are not there,'' Wood said. ''So the customer is just left out there hanging.''
Other users said AT&T account representatives are growing reluctant to quote an installation
interval because they fear that a hot spot will be declared in the area. ''I guarantee you have a lot of
sales reps who are very nervous right now,'' said one large Tariff 12 user who asked not to be
identified. He said he has found it particularly difficult to order circuits in the Chicago area.
''We're aggressively putting in additional capacity,'' Eslambolchi said. ''We have an unbelievable set
of numbers through '98 and '99.'' But analysts said demand could continue to overwhelm supply
while AT&T moves to close the TCG deal and implement Armstrong's edge-switch architecture.
''I think it will be rough for at least another three or four months,'' Ayvazian said. |
