There is a good deal of money to be made out of exporting administrative telecommunications software – witness the business done by Cincinatti Bell Inc with Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp on its customer services package, and British Telecom is stepping up its efforts to export one of its own products, a network management system introduced to its London support centre four months ago. Discussions are taking place with operators in Europe and the Pacific with a contract close to completion with New Zealand, said a Telecom staffer. The system is now in operation at two centres: London controls the network traffic within the Greater London region while Oswestry monitors the rest of the UK’s digital phone traffic. Trouble spots are pinpointed and action taken prevent the rest of the network becoming clogged and degrading performance for the customer. Telecom cited the recent phone-in Telethon charity fund raising effort as an example of how the network management was utilised to keep Telethon callers waiting in a queue, minimising its impact on other London traffic. Similarly, faults or failures on local exchanges are immediately flagged to the control room which can reroute traffic. A system called Asprin to dedicate trunk lines purely for back-up is also under development.
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