AURORA, Colo.-Lucent Technologies Inc. has opened a state-of-the-art operations center in Aurora, Colo., to provide a wide range of network management services to telecommunications companies in the local, long-distance and wireless services markets.
Called the Lucent Technologies Network Reliability Center, the facility allows service providers to efficiently monitor their networks from one centralized location. From the center, Lucent can remotely identify and repair outages and other network problems while allowing for the provision of new revenue-generating services, said Lucent. The NRC has the capacity to manage 200 to 600 digital switches.
“The Telecom Act of 1996 opened the door to more competition from new entrants and existing telecom companies getting into new markets,” said Rock Pennella, vice president of services in the North American region. “To succeed in this incredibly competitive market, a communications company must offer high quality, reliable and competitively priced services. Yet our research indicates, it may be cost prohibitive for every company to build and maintain its own network operations centers to ensure that reliability.”
Lucent said that by using the NRC for all of its network management needs, a service provider can concentrate its resources on marketing its business, reduce operational costs and assure its customers high quality and reliable service.
The NRC uses Lucent’s extensive portfolio of proven operations systems software, which currently is deployed to manage 50 large-scale telephone networks in 20 countries. The company’s operations support software used by the NRC and backed by Bell Laboratories, provides seamless support of networks by rerouting network traffic and dispatching technicians when there’s a service problem, manages traffic flow and overall network configuration and pro-actively tracks and reconfigures transport networks to assure reliability of service, said Lucent.
About 100 employees staff the NRC, and an additional 60 engineers and technicians are located throughout the United States to provide on-site support and operations planning services. The new NRC services complement Lucent’s existing 10,000-person services organization in providing ongoing installation, engineering and maintenance to network service providers around the world.
