April 2007
Welcome to the spring edition of our bulletin on delivery of our Undertakings. In this issue we cover the conclusion of mass migration of the BT installed base of IPstream customers onto an equivalent solution, progress on migrating the appropriate installed base on to WES and BES equivalent solutions, a briefing on Openreach service standards and the work in hand further to improve them, an update on three of the exemptions provided for in Ofcom's June 2006 statement and the review of the Contract Management Mechanism.
BT continues to make progress in working through the Undertakings obligations, and continues to learn as it does so. The scale of investment and effort required to both extend the capabilities of the EMP platform and to ensure it is robust and reliable has proved considerable, and more substantial than we first thought. The delivery of systems separation is a major and complex exercise, particularly in the case of systems supporting transactions between BT Wholesale and Openreach and enabling the construction and support of Openreach products. Nonetheless we are pleased with the progress we have made, with a substantial proportion of the Undertakings delivered and behind us, albeit with some daunting challenges still to come.
The precedent set in the UK by the Undertakings has attracted worldwide interest from regulators and, rather more apprehensively, incumbents. The latest instance of the influence of the UK model is in New Zealand, where earlier this month the Minister of Commerce published a consultation on the functional separation of Telecom New Zealand and the introduction of obligations of equivalence. Details can be seen here.
Peter McCarthy-Ward
BT Director of Equivalence, BT Group
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The mass migration of IPstream to the new Equivalence Management Platform (EMP) Database, as part of its commitment to deliver EOI, has been completed as planned and an installed base of over 8.8M customers is now being served equivalently.
Openreach is pleased to announce that the installed base of BT’s Ethernet Access Lines and IPVPN access tails was successfully migrated to EoI status over the weekend of 27/28 January 2007. Some work to migrate services that had orders in progress continued but were all completed before 31 March 2007. The IBMC date for Ethernet Access Lines and IPVPN access tails was 31 March 2007 and was achieved.
At the start of this year you may well recall that the UK experienced the worst storms for 16 years which caused significant damage to the Openreach overhead network. Whilst most regions were affected, some fared worse than others (South West, Wales, North West and Scotland). Service, as you would expect, was adversely affected and it was all hands to the pump. In spite of this, we were able to maintain good service on backhaul and provision requiring a frames jumper.
An external audit of BT’s implementation of access controls over certain Management Information Systems has recently reported to the Equality of Access Board. The report found that BT had satisfied its obligations.
Under the agreement relating to request #2 of Ofcom’s 15 June 2006 Statement, Openreach is allowed to accept orders from non-CPs, and bill for the service provided, for services relating to customer-owned wiring. Where such services are provided via a CP, the agreement allowed such services to be provided on a non-equivalent (EOI) basis until 1 April 2007. Thereafter an EOI process needs to be followed.
Under this exemption (request #5, Ofcom Statement of 21 December 2006), BT was required to provide Ofcom with a list of specific engineering services provided to BT Wholesale and BT Global Services under the existing contracts identified by BT in its request for the exemption.
We were due to develop and launch a new EOI process for ISDN and Home Highway conversions by 31 April 2007.
The Contract Management Mechanism (CMM) is a process for Communications Providers (CPs) and BT to address issues that arise when negotiating terms and conditions of SMP Products (as defined in the Undertakings). It came into effect on 22 March 2006. The process provides for a review of its effectiveness after 9 months.