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BellSouth's Louisiana & Georgia Phone Companies are not Open to Competitors: Rep. Billy Tauzin's Own State Harms Competition.
BellSouth has applied in Louisiana and Georgia to enter Long Distance. Their entrance into this new market is requires evidence that the phone networks are open to competition and that the company can pass a basic 14 point checklist.
On November 6th, 2001, The Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a report that the Bell South's networks in these states are not properly open to competition and that they should not be allowed in Long Distance at this time.
The report found that in this 'information age", the BellSouth (OSS) ordering system requires manual rekeying or faxing of the orders. This in turn also makes the companies make mistakes that block orders or that the orders don't go through. Imagine being a company that had to hand deliver their web-page information, or print and then mail it or fax it.
Rep. Billy Tauzin represents the state of Louisiana. It is obvious that he hasn't been able to get the company he regularly lobbies for to pass muster and provide adequate services to competitors. How can Tauzin-Dingell then be able to get the Bell companies to deliver on their promises of broadband. History is clear that the Bell companies did not deliver broadband when they already got financial incentives. And now there is clear proof that the phone companies are not even willing/able to properly open their networks to competition.
Instead of the FCC and the Department of Justice considering BellSouth's application to into Long Distance, shouldn't there be penalties for not being able to process orders in a "timely and reasonable" fashion? Is this harm to competition a violation of the Telecom Act.
The Full DOJ report http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/public/comments/sec271/bellsouth/9527.htm
"Several CLECs attempting to compete with BellSouth in Georgia have complained in state proceedings, and now to this Commission, that BellSouth is processing a large number of their orders manually.(37) To manually process an order, BellSouth's service representatives re-type some or all of the information on the CLEC order form into an internal electronic service order. This manual processing increases the expense of CLEC ordering, lengthens the time required to place customers in service, and creates errors that cause service requests to be improperly rejected or to be provisioned incorrectly.(38)."...BellSouth's most recent iteration of its achieved flow-through rates indicates that its service representatives process about a third of electronically submitted UNE orders manually.(42)
" ... The magnitude of manually processed orders for some CLECs, however, is even greater. Covad Communications, currently the major competitor using DSL technology in Georgia,(43) asserts that significantly more of its orders have to be faxed to BellSouth -- and then completely re-typed by BellSouth services representatives -- because BellSouth has not designed its electronic ordering interfaces to accept the types of orders Covad submits.(44) For Covad, the required faxing makes ordering more expensive in Georgia than it is in California, where Covad can place orders electronically.(45) Manual submission of orders prevents Covad from having real-time access to the electronic functions necessary to maintain good customer relations.(46) The FCC anticipated such problems when it established that, to achieve checklist compliance, an RBOC must demonstrate development of sufficient electronic and manual interfaces to allow competing carriers to access all necessary OSS functions and, in particular, equivalent electronic access to functions that the RBOC itself accesses electronically.(47)
" .... However, Birch Telecom (a competitor) asserts that roughly 35 to 45 percent of its electronically submitted orders are manually processed either because BellSouth's OSS has not been sufficiently developed to process the order on an automated basis or because a glitch in the software causes them to fall out for manual intervention.(49)
."... In addition to introducing errors when manually creating internal service orders, BellSouth apparently often rejects a significant amount of CLEC orders that it should accept for processing.(58) Processing of these orders is necessarily delayed as the rejected order must be re-submitted. Moreover, the extent of the delay depends on how long it takes the CLEC to determine that the order it originally submitted did not contain errors and should be re-submitted in its original form.(59)
" ....CLECs also complain that their subscribers are increasingly suffering from loss of dial tone upon conversion to the UNE-platform.(64) Such outages damage CLECs' reputations as customers' initial impressions are ones of inferior service.(65)