Carrier B has been providing backhaul to carriers for several years. Looking to leverage their fiber, grow their revenues and confident of their service delivery, they signed an MSA with the nation’s second largest cell carrier. Soon they had turned up over a hundred towers and had built fiber into the switching centers. All was good; meeting FOC dates, turning up services, growing together.

THE DREADED EMAIL: “WE WANT TO REVIEW PERFORMANCE FROM 6 MONTHS AGO”

AT&T mandates all carriers to provide a specific report designed to be used to judge network performance and enforce service-level credits when SLA’s are not met. There are several challenges to providing a suitable report. One hurdle is AT&T will request reports from up to 6 months ago. Therefore, it is essential to have granular historical performance data to meet AT&T’s requirements.

Another challenge is the report focuses on three (3) separate but interrelated areas where AT&T can request service-level credits. These areas include:

• Data Delivery Ratio (DDR) %
• Performance Metrics (RTD/FJ)
• Overall MTTR/TRR Circuit Availability (CA) %

These metrics require a PASS/FAIL and it is up to Carrier B to calculate these KPI’s based on the performance of their network, maintenance, outages, and AT&T’s “accepted” trouble tickets. AT&T analysts will question “network unavailability,” which may or may not impact your DDR and CA calculations with technical equations and calculations. For example, does Carrier B’s network outage for 2 minutes impact DDR % or CA % or both? Which is right and which is wrong? Another case is a network outage that Carrier B detected and documented, but AT&T did not report. Does the outage count under MTTR and/or TTR? Misconstruing these calculations will cause significant credits that Carrier B will have to provide to AT&T.

Carrier B needed to ensure they understood AT&T’s reporting format in relation to their processes and be able to prove their network performance had a passing grade.

A QUICK CALL SOLVED IT ALL

Carrier B contacted LB Networks. Our analyst jumped in worked with Carrier B’s team. Having extensive experience and understanding of AT&T’s mandates, they quickly reviewed several of Carrier B’s operational and reporting processes. These ranged from maintenance periods, exclusion periods, tracking trouble tickets, and identifying methods to calculate performance leveraging these areas. Within hours, they were able to properly calculate performance resulting in what had originally been reported as 8 fails by AT&T was now down to 1. Not only did this save the SLA credits on 7 circuits, it also made the AT&T Lata being in compliance. The LB Networks analysts joined Carrier B on the AT&T call, assisted in the explanation, and in 20 minutes the call was over with a happy customer and happy carrier!

Schedule a free 30-minute discussion with our CSBH analysts to learn more about how LB Networks can assist your organization’s compliance with AT&T.