CTO: BellSouth lost 9 COs to Katrina

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: OPTICAL NETWORKING
10/26/05

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* BellSouth CTO Bill Smith
* Links related to Optical Networking
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: CTO: BellSouth lost 9 COs to Katrina

By Jim Duffy

LAS VEGAS -- Hurricane Katrina destroyed nine BellSouth central
offices in the Gulf Coast region, BellSouth's CTO said this
week.

The lost COs served 20,000 lines on the Mississippi coast and on
the peninsula south of New Orleans, said Bill Smith, BellSouth
CTO. BellSouth is deploying digital loop carrier systems to
restore service, Smith says.

Reconstructing the COs, however, will depend on whether people
repopulate those affected areas.

"The ones that were totally destroyed were typically small
offices," Smith says.

BellSouth has 4.7 million lines in the Katrina-affected areas of
Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Eleven other COs are still out of service but in various stages
of restoration, Smith says. Two in heavily devastated areas of
downtown New Orleans will be restored this month and in
mid-November, he says.

BellSouth is sticking to its initial estimates of $400 million
to $600 million in costs associated with the most destructive
storm in U.S. history, which devastated New Orleans and the Gulf
Coast in late August. The carrier expects to take a $100 million
charge against earnings in the third quarter to cover costs
associated with asset impairment.

In a wide-ranging interview with Network World at the Telecom
'05 conference here, Smith said BellSouth has all of the
technology assets it requires to compete with the mega-carriers
formed from the mergers of SBC and AT&T, and Verizon and MCI.
Owing to a recent nationwide MPLS interconnect agreement with
Sprint Nextel, Smith says it is not incumbent upon BellSouth to
acquire additional facilities in order to compete.

"We believe that we've got the capabilities to compete
effectively, particularly with the recent announcement with
Sprint," he says. "Prior to that agreement, it was a challenge."

The challenge for SBC and Verizon, Smith notes, is that they are
acquiring carriers that have a declining revenue base. Though
the services are still profitable, it will be hard, if not
impossible, to generate top-line growth.

"I think we can be very competitive because it's new revenue for
us, and as long as it's profitable revenue the fact that it's
being priced down from what it used to be to what it is now is
irrelevant to us," he says. "An incumbent provider has that
concern to deal with."

Smith says BellSouth chose Sprint over Qwest, with which it has
an existing nationwide wholesale arrangement, because testing
demonstrated that BellSouth could extend the same SLAs and
service classes it offers regionally for managed VPNs on its
nine-state IP backbone end-to-end across the Sprint network.

To continue reading this story, please see page 2 at:
<http://www.networkworld.com/nloptical9620>

The top 5: Today's most-read stories

1. Cisco talking IP-radio nets
<http://www.networkworld.com/nloptical9621>
2. How to respond to a security breach
<http://www.networkworld.com/nloptical9622>
3. School traps infected PCs in its web
<http://www.networkworld.com/nloptical9390>
4. Cartoon of the Week
<http://www.networkworld.com/nloptical9391>
5. CTO: BellSouth lost 9 COs to Katrina
<http://www.networkworld.com/nloptical9623>

_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Jim Duffy

Jim Duffy is managing editor of Network World's service provider
equipment coverage
<http://www.networkworld.com/topics/service-providers.html>. He
has 18 years of high-tech reporting experience, including over
12 years at Network World. Previously, he was senior editor at
Computer Systems News and associate editor/reporter at
Electronic News and MIS Week. He can be reached at
<mailto:jduffy@nww.com>.
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Intel
Optimizing the Value of Today's Server Hardware Transitions

Infrastructure demands are increasing, and the computing
industry is transitioning to multi-core processors, server
virtualization, and 64-bit computing to support next-generation
workloads. Read Optimizing the Value of Today's Server Hardware
and learn how Intel is integrating a broad set of new server
technologies to support these transitions.
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=118094
_______________________________________________________________
ARCHIVE LINKS

Archive of the Optical Networking newsletter:
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FEATURED READER RESOURCE

GRID TAKING SHAPE IN THE ENTERPRISE

Grid computing continues to gain ground and vendors such as IBM,
Platform Computing, Sun, SAS and Univa are launching services,
products and partnerships to support this growth. But will
challenges such as software licensing, security and bandwidth
issues hinder grid rollouts? Click here for more:

<http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/101005-grid.html>
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