FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Birmingham, UK, Aug 14, 2003 – The operative concept around the BT RACE headquarters in Birmingham, England, is proactive maintenance.

RACE, an acronym for Remote Access Customer Equipment, summarizes a philosophy that BT has used since 1988 to differentiate its customer premises equipment services offerings.

Customers of RACE range from multi-site, multi-national corporate networks to single site businesses with small key systems.  All told, the RACE group maintains over 63,000 customer sites.  As the tools of choice in its fight to retain profitability and market leadership, BT uses the hardware and software products of TSB Solutions Inc. of Toronto.

In the U.K. as elsewhere, the telecommunications world is in a state of evolutionary flux as circuit-switched technology slowly gives way to packet-switched data networks and Voice over Internet Protocol delivery.

“Voice has become a legacy business,” says Andy Clark, Remote Platforms Strategy Manager for BT.  “The challenge in this environment is to select remote access tools that are flexible and cost effective, and to work with vendors who can quickly evolve their products to meet changing conditions”.  RACE has been using TSB’s intelligent remote element monitors and central data transport software continuously since 1988.

“Eventually network management will be exclusively SNMP-based, simplifying things considerably,” says Andy, “but for the foreseeable future RACE must be able to profitably manage the latest and greatest new systems side-by-side with the thousands of relatively new digital PBX’s and smaller systems still used by our customers”.

What Andy describes as “the man in the van” is the biggest obstacle to RACE profitability.  “The moment an alarm can’t be resolved by remote access, costs start to add up rapidly.  Just opening a ticket to dispatch a technician costs ₤200 and that’s before anything gets actually fixed”, he says.  So the RACE program tries to use TSB’s remote access solutions for every piece of equipment that isn’t SNMP-enabled and on a growing number of SNMP scenarios as well.

On the installed base of almost 11,000 Nortel Networks Meridian 1 systems alone, Andy figures BT saves ₤20 million a year, and that’s not counting additional savings realized from Ericsson, Siemens and other manufactures’ systems that TSB Solutions supports.  “We are contractually committed to supporting Meridian switches until the year 2010,” Andy says.  “They still must be profitable for BT to manage as long as they remain in service, and TSB Solutions makes that undertaking feasible”.

David Rollins, a Remote Technical Analyst on the front lines of the RACE program, summarizes the competitive advantages BT gets from TSB Solutions:  “TSB’s products generate big savings by eliminating site visits.  They promote customer confidence by enabling faster response time to customers’ requests and proactive maintenance – we repair faults before customers know they’ve occurred.  Alarm classification and live filtering of incoming alarms, a strong suit of the TSB product set, lets us distill 1,000 alarms an hour down to 200 actionable items.  And TSB offers a complete range of remote access hardware – from single port, modem-based; to multi-port ISDN-based units – allowing RACE to tailor its service offerings to meet changing markets and needs”.

What does the future hold in store for RACE?  Without hesitation, Andy Clark replies.  “Progressively smarter TSB hardware that can automatically diagnose and repair faults without a technician’s intervention; central data transport security administrative software that can schedule, install and maintain software patches; and flexible communications options that work equally well in hardwired, dialup, ISDN, DSL and LAN network environments.

As BT’s RACE program aptly demonstrates, provision of maintenance services remains a profitable segment of telecommunications as long as the operative words are proactive maintenance and as long as service providers relentlessly avoid the expense of the man in the van.

For more information on BT’s RACE program and TSB Solutions’ products, please contact:

David Kirwan
President
TSB Solutions Inc.
416-622-7010 Ext. 270
david.kirwan@tsbsolutions.com