Fiber crush....
cnn.com
Growing pains snag Qwest
November 8, 1999
Web posted at: 9:24 a.m. EST (1424 GMT)
by David Rohde
From...
(IDG) -- Cracks are beginning to show in the shiny armor of America's
newest national carrier.
Users and consultants charge that Qwest Communications, which recently
completed its 18,500-mile national network, is missing installation dates on
private lines, frame relay nodes and Web-hosting facilities. Some customers
are finding it hard to get through to support lines to verify orders, and a few
have suffered spot outages on already-installed lines.
Last week, Qwest officials confirmed the company recently suffered a frame
relay and ATM outage in Atlanta and a failure of some ISDN circuits in Los
Angeles. They also confirmed that Qwest's Web hosting facility in
Sunnyvale, Calif., ran out of hosting space less than two weeks after it
opened over the summer and the carrier has since been unable to fulfill new
orders there.
But Qwest executives insist they're on top of the situation. "I acknowledge
that there may be customers that have been disappointed in our
performance, but we don't have a systematic maintenance and provisioning
crisis in this company," Qwest President Afshin Mohebbi said.
Yet Mohebbi confirmed industry whispers that Qwest ran out of optical
backbone equipment from its principal supplier, Nortel Networks, during the
second quarter. Qwest then turned to rival Lucent -- via an emergency call
from Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio to Lucent CEO Rich McGinn -- to obtain
equipment to "light" additional fibers in the Qwest network.
"Have we been surprised with a huge
amount of demand for our products? Yes,"
Mohebbi remarks. Qwest has now
increased its capital budget by $200 million
and is increasing orders with Nortel and
Lucent, according to Mohebbi, who adds:
"We're not going to cut any corners."
But some users say Qwest is barely in a
position to take new orders, much less fill
them correctly. Dan Healy, senior vice
president of Rockefeller Group
Telecommunications Services in New York,
says he placed an order with Qwest in May
for two T-1 lines to Europe and is still
waiting. The problem hasn't been the
installation, but rather establishing a valid
account with Qwest customer service.
"We finally got the account set up when I
sent them a termination letter," Healy says.
Qwest simply has "too much business" right
now, he adds.
Some analysts say they've seen chronic
delays with Qwest. "I've got a [Qwest]
customer who is working on a 90-site frame
relay network, and it's taken them most of
this year to get it installed, and they're
beyond frustrated," says Lisa Pierce, a
telecom analyst with Giga Information Group. Other users have ordered
Qwest frame relay circuits as backup following recent major carrier outages,
Pierce says, yet "the service is not there when they need to use it."
In Atlanta, where Qwest recently won several big contracts from companies
including Delta Airlines, a frame relay/ATM switch recently failed for part of
one day after some cards from Lucent went bad, according to Qwest. For
Delta, that exacerbated problems that began last spring after it signed
contracts with Qwest and MCI WorldCom for fully redundant T-3 ATM
links into 26 airports nationwide.
"[Qwest] got off to a real rocky start. They didn't realize the magnitude of
this effort," says Paul Millard, Delta's vice president of engineering. The
carrier missed installation dates because of problems connecting with local
carriers, Millard says. Qwest also couldn't light a network segment from
Atlanta to south Florida because of the optical manufacturing shortage, so it
had to lease additional capacity. And support out of its network operations
centers in Denver and Arlington, Va., "was less than satisfactory," though it
has now improved, and 24 of the 26 T-3 links are in, Millard adds.
In northern California, Qwest officials say they misjudged demand for Web
hosting in Sunnyvale and almost immediately ran out of space they expected
to last for 12 months. The company is now building an additional 1.6 million
square feet of hosting space nationwide. And in southern California, a user
consultant who asked not to be identified charged that Qwest has had
periods in which no ports were available on its two Nortel DMS 250
telephony switches.
Qwest officials deny the Los Angeles switches are maxed out but confirm
that 18 customers' ISDN Primary Rate Interface circuits recently went down
for three days. The problem occurred because a technician failed to "fill out
a data field" in a software load, says Mack Greene, Qwest's vice president
of voice and data product management.
Qwest officials also say they are suffering delays of their own getting Pacific
Bell to pony up local loops, but outsiders say that explanation only goes
partway. "It's taking four months to get a T-1 installed," says the local
consultant. "Their network is way oversold."
Indeed, Qwest sells through direct and indirect channels, and has already
recruited 7,000 Microsoft-certified, value-added resellers to bang the drum
for Qwest services. Last year, Qwest gave its sales force tools that enable
salespeople to place mass-market orders directly over an extranet, Greene
says.
But even some high-profile custom orders seem to be falling through. For
example, Qwest is the carrier for the Abilene Project, a high-speed research
network linking dozens of universities that was announced by Vice President
Al Gore last year. Qwest has had "execution and delivery problems getting
many of the schools their promised OC-3 links, with some that have placed
orders as long ago as February still waiting, says Jeff Crowder, project
director for communications network services at Virginia Tech University.
A Qwest spokesman says the Abilene orders are taking an average of three
months but concedes some have fallen behind because of internal
provisioning issues or delays from local carriers.
Qwest's challenges are coming at a critical time, because ever since MCI
WorldCom announced it would acquire Sprint, Qwest has openly touted
itself as Sprint's potential replacement as a comprehensive No. 3 carrier. In
fact, last year Qwest acquired its own established long-distance carrier, LCI
International, and began selling traditional circuit-switched services along
with the high-capacity IP bandwidth it touts publicly.
That move helped Qwest increase revenue, but some users feel the buy
stretched Qwest thin -- not to mention its pending acquisition of US West.
And even though Qwest's physical construction is complete, officials admit
that only a few of the 48 available fiber pairs at any place of the network
may be lit with the proper electronics, forcing Qwest to continually raise
order forecasts to meet demand. "The key point is the manufacturing issue,"
Mohebbi says. "Anything that we can get our hands on, we get our hands
on."
Users are rooting for Qwest to fully pull itself together. Crowder says Qwest
is offering T-3 Internet access links for $10,000 per month, compared to up
to $35,000 from other carriers. That heartens Qwest officials, who are only
too happy to take a swipe at MCI WorldCom and Sprint when asked why
Qwest will continue to sell hard. "Dumb and Dumber getting together is one
of the best reasons," Mohebbi says. "People want to buy our stuff." |
