Gateways to competition
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened the market for local phone service to competition. This legislation encourages competition by requiring the incumbent regional Bell operating companies to allow competitive local exchange carriers, or CLECs, to lease portions of the incumbents' networks.

CLECs are seeking to win customers from the incumbents by offering better pricing and service. Accordingly, the key to a CLEC's success is quickly turning on service for new customers and subsequently providing high levels of customer care. This is where DSET's electronic-bonding gateways and related products enter the picture.

With DSET gateways, CLECs can complete all of the tasks that comprise what is known as the "provisioning" or "service-fulfillment" process and turn on phone service for customers in days rather than weeks. In addition, DSET solutions help CLECs maintain the highest possible quality of service for the customers they've won from their competitors.

Service catalogs and sales quotes
For both business and residential customers, switching phone service to a CLEC involves the same steps.

First, a CLEC has to tell a potential customer what services are available and how much they will cost. DSET's ezPreOrder solution electronically retrieves customer service records, or CSRs, from an incumbent local exchange carrier to accelerate the preparation of sales quotes demonstrating the savings customers could realize by switching their service to the CLEC. DSET's ezPreOrder gateway also helps a competitive carrier's service representatives obtain the correct information essential for the smooth processing of orders.

Statistically, at least 40% of all orders are rejected by trading partners because of incorrect information in the orders. For example, the most frequent cause for an order rejection is an incorrect service address. For the competitive provider, order rejections result in increased overhead expenses, longer order-turnaround times, loss of potential revenue due to delays in service activation, and lower customer satisfaction.

Forms, forms, forms
After a customer and a CLEC agree on a service package, it's necessary to order lines, typically local loops, from an incumbent provider. A business might also order special high-capacity circuits. With DSET's ezLocal gateway, a CLEC can automate the ordering of local loops from an incumbent by interconnecting its order management system -- a type of OSS -- with the appropriate system at the incumbent. Our ezAccess gateway automates ordering high-capacity circuits.

While the technology involved is complex, this ordering phase is essentially a matter of processing very detailed forms. DSET's ezLocal and ezAccess gateways eliminate the necessity of exchanging literally thousands of paper faxes, making the migration of customers to a CLEC from an incumbent much faster and far less costly.


Keeping those numbers
DSET's ezNumberPort gateway helps to enable the local number portability (LNP) mandated by the Federal Communications Commission, which allows customers to keep their local phone numbers when they switch service providers. When a customer switches from an incumbent to a competitive carrier, the CLEC must inform the appropriate regional Number Portability Administration Centers (NPACs) that it is the customer's new provider. A CLEC can automatically exchange the required information with any of the eight NPACs in North America via ezNumberPort.

Taking care of trouble
DSET gateway software does more than enable fast, reliable provisioning of local phone service and local number portability. There's also post-order customer care.

Although phone service is very reliable, problems do occur -- and carriers as well as customers want problems corrected as quickly as possible. This aspect of post-order customer care is facilitated by DSET's ezTroubleAdmin gateway, which automates the flow of trouble-ticket data between CLECs and the incumbent carriers with which they interconnect. Automating the exchange of such data expedites the resolution of problems that affect a CLEC's customers but which may be caused by some failure in the incumbent's systems.

Basic components of competition
DSET's pre-order, ordering, and post-order solutions are contributing to the success of CLECs across the United States. In doing so, they are also helping to foster the competition that is giving small and medium-size businesses as well as residential consumers an expanding spectrum of choices among services and providers.