PDF of this tutorialIt's one thing to talk about interconnection but another thing to understand how it affects actual service providers and their customers.
Start Local
Consider a typical U.S. case prior to the emergence of the first clearinghouse. A CLEC establishes an electronic, point-to-point gateway to an ILEC to resell local services. Although the industry has issued local service ordering guidelines (LSOGs) in an attempt to standardize the forms and procedures used to process orders, every ILEC interprets those guidelines a little differently, and every ILEC's service portfolio has variations. So the CLEC must be sure that it knows and follows that ILEC's rules for how the customer's address must be recorded, whether abbreviations are allowed, whether there are specific codes for certain entries, and so on. Remember, every order invokes 2,000 to 3,000 different stylistic and procedural rules, which are constantly being changed and updated. Getting the slightest detail wrong results in a rejection and requires the CLEC to start the process over. For each and every reject, ILECs charge CLECs a penalty of $40 to $70.
In the United States, each transaction completed via a point-to-point gateway has taken, on average, four tries before being successfully completed. Given the costs of rejections and general maintenance of rules, interfaces, and communication protocols, over a two-year period it could easily cost a CLEC more to maintain a gateway than it originally cost to build it. And that does not factor in the "price" paid in end-customer annoyance when a seemingly simple order takes days or weeks to complete.
Now Go Global
You run a DLEC that is touting worldwide DSL service for small business. A start-up U.S. import company signs up for service to facilitate its budding relationships with exporters in Belgium, Japan, and Mexico. You first move to establish your client's DSL service in the United States. After several rejections, because digits in the phone number were transposed by a customer service representative and the client's street name was entered as "Road" instead of "Lane," U.S. service is established. But your work has just begun.
Similar gateways and communications are required with incumbents in each of the countries in which your client does business. For each country, ordering data must be transmitted in the native language and must adhere to each service provider's order-related conventions and rules. Again, after working through the proper translations and formats and correcting a series of rejections you finally establish service in Belgium and Japan. But just as you begin working on Mexico, a notice arrives from Japan informing you that installation of a new operations support system (OSS) has streamlined the Japanese provisioning process, and, by the way, requires you to resend your customer data in the new format. You must inform your customer that service to Japan will be held up a little longer while you comply with the new Japanese rules. Meanwhile, you are putting through the Mexican order, when Belgium lets you know that it is updating its security firewall, requiring additional identifying information.
When service is finally up and running in the United States and all three overseas locations, that one client's account will still require continuous "care and feeding" to ensure uninterrupted quality of service.
This is not science fiction. It is a tremendous operational challenge to deliver on one promise to one little customer. Expand that customer's needs even a little—perhaps adding just a few more countries—and the difficulty increases exponentially. And there is no telling how long it will take to recover the up-front costs that you inevitably incur in provisioning—related penalties, staff, and time—assuming that your client doesn't leave in frustration part of the way through the process. Don't forget, every extra day that it takes to make good on your customer's order means loss of business for that company.
An interconnection ASP takes virtually all provisioning details out of the carrier's hands, freeing up time and resources that can be devoted to that carrier's core business. With the ASP/clearinghouse, your customer's multifaceted request for international DSL boils down to one simple order. All the "work" is handled automatically by the clearinghouse.
