Article from NW Fusion on Y2K spending by Telcos - Discusses Nortel and Lucent. Maybe, if telcos are spending heavily to have Nortel and Lucent upgrade switches, there will be less money for Cisco and Ascend.
Telcos go down to Y2k wire
By David Rohde and Tim Greene
Network World, 10/19/98
Washington, D.C. - If your company has its Year
2000 act together, congratulations. But if you plan to
start testing your network for Year 2000 compliance
on Jan. 1, 1999, good luck with your wide-area links.
The telecom industry won't be anywhere near ready to
help you then - if ever.
Early predictions by large carriers saying they would
have all their network elements Year 2000-compliant
by this year have almost all gone down the drain. Now
1999 is expected to be a nail-biting time as the
telecom industry struggles to identify its inventory,
upgrade hardware and software, and convince small
telephone companies and international carriers to get
up to speed on Year 2000.
"I think they'll be testing up to the last minute," says
Ronnie Lee Bennett, Year 2000
program management director for Lucent, the nation's
largest supplier of telecom gear.
"It's definitely going to come down to the wire," says
John Hart, director of marketing for Saville Systems, a
telecom-industry billing vendor.
That's left users cooling their heels waiting for carriers
to invite them in to do interoperability testing - an
invitation that hasn't been forthcoming. Especially
worried are financial institutions that face
government-imposed deadlines for Year 2000
compliance.
"We're going to each individual carrier to ask where
they stand," says one WallStreet telecom manager
who asked not to be identified. "They're scratching
their heads; they're working on it. They're a great
unknown."
The telecom industry's lagging pace is due to several
factors. One big reason: Many carriers started
working on Year 2000 compliance by expanding the
two-digit date field to four digits, then reversed field
and decided to keep the two digits but assign certain
years to either the 20th or 21st century. But an even
bigger factor looms.
"You can't bring the live network down to do live
testing," says John Pasqua, AT&T's Year 2000
program vice president. Even if corporate customers
say they are willing to bring down their own WANs
for a time, that wouldn't do any good. "Most of these
are virtual private networks. You can't bring them
down," Pasqua says.
For its part, AT&T has been out front publicly on the
Year 2000 issue. CEO C. Michael Armstrong is
chairing a Federal Communications
Commission-sponsored forum looking into the issue,
and top officials say AT&T will have all the necessary
systems installed by year-end. By contrast, most
regional Bell operating companies and GTE are now
setting June 30, 1999, as the date by which they will
have all their Year 2000 systems installed.
Among the RBOCs, Ameritech is clinging to the goal
of achieving compliance by Jan. 1, 1999, with an
understanding that some work might not be done. One
reason for Ameritech's relative confidence is its
suppliers' ability to provide Year 2000 software
upgrades for one critical part of the network: the
so-called Class 5 end office switch, the box that sits
next to the customer.
For example, Nortel Networks in November 1997
produced its first Year 2000-compliant software
release of its flagship DMS-100 local switch. A full
97% of the DMS-100 installed base is now Year
2000-compliant, claims Oliver Chan, Nortel's senior
manager for Year 2000 program management.
Likewise, Lucent officials say more than 90% of the
installed base of the company's flagship 5ESS local
carrier switch has been upgraded to Year
2000-compliant software.
But not all is rosy in the local switching realm. Siemens
Information and Communication Networks, the
third-largest switch supplier in the U.S., produced
Year 2000-compliant software for its EWSD local
switch in the first quarter, but only last quarter came
out with a patch for its smaller DCO switch. As a
result, 72% of EWSD switches are Year 2000-ready,
but it's "hard to estimate" how many carriers have
upgraded the DCO, a company spokesman says.
Some observers question the overall percentages of
RBOC upgrades. Don Gilbert, senior vice president
for information technology at the National Retail
Federation, says he's seen some central office reports
from Bell Atlantic that trouble him. "When you look at
those reports, you see that some of the switches won't
be upgraded until the fourth quarter of 1999, and
some don't have any upgrade dates at all," he says.
Meanwhile, Lucent and Nortel have let Year 2000
compliance for their long-distance switches run behind
the local switches. Nortel, which supplies MCI
WorldCom and Sprint, only last month released the
first Year 2000-compliant software for its DMS-250
long-distance switch. Neither MCI WorldCom nor
Sprint divulged information on when their DMS-250
upgrades would be complete, though an MCI
WorldCom spokesman said the carrier had its hands
on the software before general release.
The international gateway switching situation is even
more heart-pounding. Nortel's DMS-300 Gateway
switch software won't be available in a Year
2000-compliant version until December - just about
one year before D-Day. And overseas carriers in
general are a big question mark. "Some foreign
carriers are doing something about Year 2000
compliance, and other carriers are ignoring it," says
Bill Cooper, manager of telecommunications industry
affairs for farm equipment maker Deere & Co. in
Moline, Ill.
SOS for OSS
Even if the domestic and international carriers were to
get all the switch software installed in time, they could
have a much harder time with operational and support
systems (OSS). Those are the systems used to keep
track of customer accounts - everything from where
circuits are supposed to run to how much money
customers owe.
Most of Lucent's OSS systems are already available in
Year 2000-compliant versions, Lucent's Bennett says.
But carriers don't upgrade OSS systems the same way
they upgrade switches, analysts say.
The biggest OSS concern is the billing arena. In many
cases, RBOC billing systems can no longer be traced
back to an original vendor. As a result, the problem
can't be addressed by simply buying a software
upgrade - the carrier has to do the work.
Many RBOCs use billing software called Customer
Record Information System (CRIS).
"CRIS was built 30 years ago, so we have taken our
version and changed it to fit our needs, and now it's
not very similar to what some other carriers have,"
says Laurie Deffenbaugh, director of Year 2000
communications for US WEST. Even the Year 2000
crisis isn't enough to motivate RBOCs to rip out these
legacy systems and start all over. CRIS "is so
embedded and integrated it's tough to get it out," says
Saville Systems' Hart.
Some established carriers do employ outside vendors'
billing products for certain services. For example,
AT&T's WorldNet IP services employ a billing system
from Kenan Systems of Cambridge, Mass., which
began offering Year 2000-compliant versions as early
as May 1997.
But don't buy the line that billing problems won't affect
other systems, says Randy Fuller, Kenan's manager of
wireline industry marketing. Any problems in the billing
package may well spill over in trouble-tickets and
maintenance systems because trouble-ticket
applications grab data from the billing system. "That's
because if a customer calls and there's a problem, the
problem may be that he hasn't paid the bill," Fuller
says.
Interoperability at risk
Where users are running into roadblocks from
RBOCs is on the issue of interoperability testing.
Facing regulatory exams on Year 2000 compliance,
many banks have been inquiring about carriers'
compliance status and the opportunity to do joint tests,
to little avail.
"There was a period where they were just getting
form-letter responses," says Gordon Glaza, a lawyer
at the American Bankers Association in Washington,
D.C. "Now in some cases that information is starting
to flow from the RBOCs. But in other cases they're
still getting more or less generic information."
By contrast, AT&T has at least offered an
interoperability bone to the banks. The telecom giant
recently invited the Federal Reserve Board to pick
several financial institutions to participate in a joint test
with AT&T. "We cannot test with every customer,
and we didn't want to be in the position of selecting
Company A and not the others," AT&T's Pasqua
says. "The results will be made available to the
industry at large."
Pasqua concedes the financial institution test will have
a flaw: It won't include local exchange carriers. As far
as full interoperability testing with a combination of
local-loop and long-distance carriers and users,
AT&T says that's not set up.
Pasqua urges users not to be alarmed about the
uncertainty in the interoperability testing dates. "It's
really not a technically overwhelming problem," he
says. Such a test would only take five or six weeks, he
says.
The RBOCs haven't made the same kind of offer to
users. Instead, their testing efforts are with each other,
via a consortium called the Telco Year 2000 Forum.
This group is mapping out tests of whether network
equipment will still interoperate with the Year 2000
fixes. The telcos hired Bellcore to map out the tests
they need to make sure their nets will still work
together.
But the Telco Year 2000 Forum is viewed skeptically
by many users. "It isn't the real thing," complains Jim
Jones, managing director of the Information
Management Forum, a group of corporate chief
information officers and network officials based in
Atlanta. "Are they literally testing a circuit? The answer
is no." He adds: "Interestingly enough, one of the first
positions they added to the Telco Forum was a
lawyer."
Contact Senior Editor
David Rohde or Tim
Greene
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