Dept. of Justice said its concerns about BellSouth (BS) Sec. 271 ...

said in evaluation issued late Tues. that it had “no substantial concerns” about ability of facilities-based and resale providers to enter BellSouth’s local markets in those states. It also didn’t “foreclose” possibility that BS could convince FCC that those concerns had been addressed during Commission’s review period. Justice said BellSouth was expecting improvements to occur as it and PSCs in La. and Ga. gained experience with new processes and data reporting systems. DoJ said its concerns about OSS operations fell into 4 areas: (1) BellSouth’s use of manual, rather than electronic, processing for many orders. “Orders that are manually processed are more likely to be provisioned incorrectly” and to slow CLEC response to customer inquiries, DoJ said. (2) Inability of CLECs to order UNE-P service by simply submitting customer’s address. “When CLECs cannot place UNE-platform orders by simply referencing the customer’s telephone number, more orders are rejected by BellSouth,” Justice said. (3) Too-frequent outages in electronic interfaces for preordering and ordering, hindering CLECs from submitting orders for new customers. DoJ said BellSouth reported no down time for interfaces in June-Aug. even though Birch Telecom said one interface was “so severely degraded” for several days in Aug. that it could place only fraction of orders it usually submitted. (4) Lack of “stable environment” for CLECs to test whether their software interfaces interacted correctly with BellSouth’s. In addition to OSS issues, DoJ cited concern about reliability of BellSouth’s performance data. It said data integrity also had been concern in 2 earlier BS applications for La. and PSCs in both La. and Ga. developed what they believed were better measures. However, those measurements are new and some problems have arisen, Justice said, “which is not surprising given the magnitude of the endeavor and the brief period within which BellSouth has sought to complete it.” BS described DoJ evaluation as “encouraging news” because “we believe our application provides documentation that addresses [DoJ’s] concerns and we will work with the FCC staff to point out these facts” in reply comments to be filed with FCC Nov. 13. Covad said it was glad DoJ pointed out OSS and performance data flaws because it had been advocating that FCC reject BellSouth application based on those same issues.