Posted: 02/1999
Self-Provisioning: Carriers' Next Battleground?
By Ken Branson
For some business customers who have been ordering their service, viewing their records and altering their service online for some time, the perceived difference may not be that great. But their long distance carriers certainly will notice the difference.
"You can actually buy 1+, toll-free and calling-card service on the 'Net right now," says Brian Fink, vice president of systems and product development at Frontier Corp., Rochester, N.Y. "But when you hit the 'send' button, [the customer's order] goes to a human. When one of our next uCommand releases comes out, when you click on that button, it will automatically put you on the node."
Barry Zipp, director of online marketing for MCI WorldCom Inc., says his company's online customer interface effort, called Interact, will lead to self-provisioning this year. "Interact really represents a re-engineering of our relationship with our customers," he says. "Rather than making them rely on service reps and account teams to analyze the bill or change routing or provision service, they'll be completely enabled through the e-commerce loop to order service, pay for service and manage their services online. They'll be able to monitor their spending. They'll be able to set up network routing arrangements for outbound or toll-free services, for disaster or contingency services. They'll also be able to submit service inquiries or trouble tickets online, and track them themselves."
| "It takes about nine forevers for an interexchange carrier to make a
change [in a customer's service], and bringing that control under a customer's oversight
is a dream come true." -- Ken McGee, telecom analyst, The Gartner Group |
Sprint Corp.'s high-end business customers were scheduled to begin seeing self-provisioning after Jan. 1, when Sprint's much-talked-about ION network began rolling out. Company spokespeople say residential customers will begin to see it by the end of this year.
"Service won't be locked into a particular terminal ID like the switched telephone network does," says John Johnston, manager of service-manager development at Sprint. "You might be off on some business trip and log into a network of services from wherever you're at. You might be limited somewhat by the device you're using, but if you're logging on with your own computer, you'd be able to access the full range of services."
Zipp, Fink and Johnston use the future tense for customers' ability to self-provision, but the future is here for many of their retail business customers and some of their residential customers were expected to benefit by year-end 1998. For all major long distance carriers, the pull of customer demand and the push of available technology have dovetailed to bring them to this point. The relative ease and efficiency of web-based applications--from the customer's point of view, at least--has been a major catalyst.
The market pull is not hard to find. Ken McGee, telecom analyst at The Gartner Group, Boston, says the world has simply passed the circuit-switched, hardware-controlled public switched telephone network (PSTN) by and left it in the dust. And, in McGee's view, no one is in mourning.
Reason No. 1 is that "it takes about nine forevers for an interexchange carrier (IXC) to make a change [in a customer's service], and bringing that control under a customer's oversight is a dream come true," McGee says. "As for reasons No. 2 and 3, see reason No. 1."
Frontier determined to do as much customer interaction as possible on the World Wide Web. This policy received a boost when the company acquired Global Center Inc., an Internet service provider (ISP), last year. Most of Global Center's customer-interaction was web-based already, Fink remembers.
"From a systems perspective, we've combined it all into one common architecture," Fink says. "Voice and data, CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) and long distance. Data includes transport and applications data service--web hosting, that sort of thing. By the end of the first quarter, it will all be the same. There will be one point of access."
The former MCI Communications Co. made it possible for high-end business customers to interact with MCI online about some things for years. Customers could view bills, track bills and pay bills online. Then they could manage their networks online. But this was what is known in the trade as a "thick-client" environment--that is, all the technological muscle required to do these things was on the customer's desktop, or at least somewhere in his building.
"We used to write software that customers would load onto their PCs (personal computers) so they could get access to our mainframe systems and get information that way," Zipp says. "Now, they just log on to the Internet through a regular web connection, type in their authentication and they have access to all their data."
The brains are in the network. The network is "thick"; the clients are "thin." This ought to be fine with the clients, Zipp reasons, since they don't have to buy software and update it, and don't have to be trained on proprietary systems. In short, they don't have to accommodate themselves to a proprietary network. Rather, an open network accommodates itself to them.
MCI WorldCom views self-provisioning as "the next big customer battleground." Many customers who have networks can manage them; customers who want to see their call-records can see them online. This quarter, customers who subscribe to MCI WorldCom's toll-free service will be able to design network routing online; outbound call-center customers will be able to do the same by the end of this quarter, Zipp says. Price reporting (what calls you made and how much each one cost), trouble ticketing and traffic reporting are available now. The next level, the grail itself, is within reach this year, Zipp says.
"Transactional service--a customer going online to order a calling card, or to set up or delete a calling card account, or to order another pager--I would consider the level of effort required to bring that up to be moderate," Zipp says. "The reason we haven't done it yet is that we were concentrating on the more impactful network management piece."
Zipp expects MCI WorldCom to be ready with that kind of provisioning in the second quarter of this year. Sometime this year--but it isn't clear yet just when--MCI WorldCom customers will be able to order and provision circuits online.
At Frontier, the trouble ticket a customer creates online still "goes to a human and the human works the issue," Fink says. But sometime this year, the trouble ticket will go straight to a work queue.
Gartner's McGee believes that the creators of Sprint's ION have thought self-provisioning through most completely. "Take a look at ION, and the answer is damn close," McGee says.
Ed Thurman, director of advanced technology development at Kansas City, Mo.-based Sprint, says getting customers' services into the customers' hands had been a goal at Sprint for years when the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 goosed the process into high gear. Sprint already had an integrated services platform in the works.
"You start with a POTS (plain old telephone service) call, wrap added value around that, turn it into multipoint-to-multipoint conferencing, add more service and turn it into a video teleconference, then wrap security around that," Thurman says, like Julia Child explaining how to make chicken Marsala. "We wanted to put the customer in the driver's seat on a per-session basis. Some of these sessions would take more bandwidth than the customer would normally have, so we wanted the customer to pay by the drink for bandwidth."
The principles behind that platform were vigorously beaten into ION, with software added from Bellcore and other vendors, and allowed to simmer until Jan. 1. Now, the recipe calls for Sprint to serve the ION in a customer-premises box the size of a toaster, which will have initiation software and dual key encryption, sometime this year. Self-provisioning and everything else Sprint wants to sell its customers will be in that box. Voila!
Regardless of the specific technical ingredients, Gartner's McGee is sure that 1999 will be the year for self-provisioning. He takes us forward to Super Bowl XXXIII. "The major advertisers for the Super Bowl will have a unique offering, and they expect an avalanche of calls," McGee posits. "So they go to their trusty little device, and they key in, 'I want more bandwidth,' and the carrier meets that demand. It will be going at the speed of business."
There will be bumps in the road, of course. In Sprint's case, for example, some analysts have questioned the company's ability to convince people to buy and use the toaster-sized box. Such kinks "would be a small sin to commit compared to assuming that conventional network services will be with us for the next 10 years," McGee says. "The genie is out of the converged network services bottle, and you're not going to put it back in."
Ken Branson is East Coast bureau chief for PHONE+ Magazine.
