On Bridge: Beth Watkins

There were minor changes to the minutes. Those changes will be made and the minutes will be redistributed.

• Subcommittee Reports
• Wireless Number Portability (Anna Miller)

1. Wireless Number Portability Report. It was suggested and agreed to that we re-arrange the outline so that it followed the WLNP Timeline. New writing assignments were made. Anne will update the outline with writing assignments and get it out to everyone by the first of next week.
2. NPAC Testing Schedule for 2000, 1, & 2. The purpose of this discussion was for clarification of who needs to be testing when. Every Thursday there is a testing conference call. NPAC.com web site has minutes from these meetings as well as conference bridge information. With any release, Neustar will assign a test coordinator who will contact carriers and determine how and when tests will be done.
3. JIP - Liaison letter has been issued to TR45.2 - T1S1.6.

4.) Inter-carrier Communications - CTIA's NAWG recommendations have been approved by the TOPS Council but not yet by the Board. The open issue of a standard communications protocol will be addressed by the NAWG.

5.) Test Plan – The face to face meeting in Tampa was very productive in putting the document together and building the appropriate test cases. There are still some gaps in testing scenarios and some administration items. But, the bulk of the document is finished. The Test Plan Team is also waiting for the inter-carrier communications process so they can build those test cases. There is also an issue concerning who will be doing the test coordination. Linda took the issue to the LNPAWG last month, and they indicated that the Regional Ops teams would own the process. The Test Plan Team will hand over the test plan to the Regional Ops teams to determine how they are going to do the coordination.

6.) Open Integration Issues -

Pre-paid calling – Given that all prepaid port requests must be validated by the Old Service Provider to confirm the request, it is concluded that slamming should not be an issue.

Mixed Service - and E911

Co-Chair Action Item: What is reporting structure of the WNPSC? Please see the following excerpt from the February, 1999 NANC meeting:

Ms. Jordan then reported on the LNPA Working Group's recommendation to create a Wireless Number Portability Working Group. Ms. Jordan reported that the impetus for the new working group is to increase participation and to be able to report directly to the NANC on wireless issues, rather than through the LNPA Working Group. Following significant discussion, in which issues were raised both in support and in opposition to the proposal, Chairman Hasselwander suggested that the wireless only group officially be recognized as a subtending group of the LNPA Working Group, but that some wireless only issues be brought directly to the NANC. Chairman Hasselwander suggested that the LNPA Working Group bring to the NANC a work plan, describing the responsibility of each subgroup. Hearing no oppositions, the NANC agreed to Chairman Hasselwander's suggestion.

• Slow Horse (Steve Addicks)

Impact on Retry Timer Change

Neustar has provided Slow Horse Report data for the thirty-day period
immediately preceding the February 20th retry timer change. Similar report
will be provided for the thirty-day period immediately following the change.

LSMS Availability Requirement
Canada reported that they have developed requirement for LSMS availability
that considers a quarterly rather than monthly objective. Also, outage
observed during prime time is viewed as being more serious than outage in
non-prime hours.

The LSMS availability requirement measures LSMS association availability,
not the availability of the LSMS itself. Concern was expressed that the
LSMS association may not be available due to an NPAC problem, not a problem
with LSMS itself, with consequence that service provider some LSMS
association outage will be unfairly attributed to the service provider.
However, part of the detailed calculations section of the proposed
requirement includes method to validate the NPAC's monthly report of LSMS
outage levels. If service provider sanctions are to be imposed based on the
NPAC's report, this inherent reporting error must be addressed and a process
developed to allow service provider challenges to the NPAC reports.

Change Orders NANC 219 and 301 both are needed to allow preparation of the
monthly LSMS availability report. These are included in NPAC release 4.0,
with implementation expected 3Q2001. A separate LLC request for an SOW to
do the report work still is required. Once the requirement is accepted at
LNPA-WG, a letter describing the report requirements should be sent to the
LLCs for their use in making the SOW request. The M&P which describes the
NPAC activity required to prepare the LSMS availability reports is being
prepared by Beth Watkins.

The high level requirement text will be extensively revised, but the
detailed calculations section which comprises the bulk of the requirement's
text appears to be accepted. Steve Addicks and Beth Watkins will revise the
introductory section and reformat the proposed requirement for slow horse
subcommittee members to review by week's end. The plan is to incorporate
comments submitted by Steve and Beth by e-mail and to have final approved
text completed by next slow horse meeting, ready to submit to LNPA-WG. If
conflicting comments are received, then it will be necessary to complete the
report at the April Slow Horse Subcommittee meeting. The material still
would be submitted to LNPA-WG in April, but not in time for the April
meeting.

• Number Pooling (Donna Navickas)

• PIM

This will be posted to website sent to cross regional and to the operations teams. This will be posted on the PIM issues matrix as closed.

At the April meeting Neustar will provide a yes or no as to their ability to support this PIM with regards to any legal issues. Donna will develop baseline M & Ps to be distributed for discussion at the next meeting. The documents that have already been produced will be redistributed with the changes suggested by BellSouth and ATT. The main issue that needs to be made clear is that the burden of proof for the necessity of the port and end user permission rests upon the requesting company.

• Wireless Co-Chair Election

Brian Egbert and Linda Godfrey were both nominated at the last meeting for the open position of Wireless Co-Chair. Linda withdrew her name as a candidate citing company policy issues. With no opposing candidates, Brian Egbert was elected as the Wireless Co-Chair. This will be taken to NANC as a part of the WG report for confirmation. Congratulations to Mr. Egbert on his election.

• Wireless/Wireline Integration 3^rd Report (NANC Discussion)

There was considerable discussion regarding the direction that NANC gave to the working group regarding the clarifications that were presented to NANC. In response to the questions about the shortened porting interval between wireless and wireline carriers and its basis in customer expectations, NANC stated that the original purpose of the report was to shorten the porting interval between all carriers not just the wireless/wireline porting. NANC directed the working group to explore that possibility as well as working on a resolution to the shortened interval for wireless/wireline porting. Initial discussion of the issue led to a general consensus as to the difficulty of shortening the overall porting interval. Each service provider was tasked with taking the issue internally to discover a rough idea of the order of magnitude that this type of change would create within existing processes and systems. This will be discussed again at the next meeting.

In regards to the E911 issues between wireless and wireline carriers, it was determined that a better understanding of the wireless process would be needed. Brian Egbert and Anna Miller agreed to prepare a presentation to the WG on the wireless process. This will be discussed on Wednesday during the time allotted for the 3^rd Report.

On Bridge
David Heath Neustar
Beth Watkins ATT

• Release 4.0 M&P discussion

John Nakamura and Jean Anthony of TSE led this discussion. All changes and discussions are recorded in the M&P document.

• NANC 301 Discussion – Neustar

Charles Green of Neustar led this discussion. He presented a handout, which will be sent out with the minutes.

NPAC Monitoring of SOA and LSMS Associations via NPAC TCP Level Heartbeat

Implementation of the monitoring by the NPAC would involve the application of HP/UX patch PHNE_17376 (This enables the support for TCP/IP heartbeats). They would also need to enable the transport layer keep alive feature on the OTS/RFC1006 stack. This will be presented to the LLCs as a no cost SOW. The proposal would be to rollout the heartbeat in one region, allow for a soak period and then implement in the rest of the regions. All recommended timers would come from the WG.

After discussion the following timer recommendations were made for the NPAC and for the service providers who wish to implement the heartbeat:

NPAC Timers
Keep Start 120 frequency 60 seconds
Keep Stop 120 (4 minute cycle to abort)
SP Timers
Keep start 60 frequency 60
Keep stop 180 (4 minute cycle to abort)

David Heath will provide a statement regarding the fact that this will be a no cost SOW to the WG and PEs. This SOW will need to be delivered to all LLCs. This will be sent to the NAPM for discussion with a recommendation that the first region be the Southwest with a soak period from the March Maintenance window to the April window. If no problems are discoverd, the remainder of the regions will be implemented during the April maintenance window. This should be installed on the test bed during this weekend for evaluation of interaction with the NPAC systems and those SPs who are connected to the test bed. If for any reason, it cannot be implemented in the Southwestern region, the Western region will be the primary implementation meeting. Installation will be during the March 19^th maintenance window then discussion at the April LNPA WG meeting on the 12^th. If there are no problems reported during that meeting, then the April 16^th maintenance window will be utilized for implementation in the other regions. Neustar will provide the Working Group with ongoing status reports for the next three WG meetings (May, June, July). These reports will include both pre and post implementation data. Evaluation of the recommended timers will be done at the April LNPA WG meeting. The heartbeat is only being implemented on the NPAC side. SPs will not have to implement a change unless they choose to do so. Implementation of the heartbeat and acceptance of the timers is recommended to all service providers. A broadcast message will be sent to all service providers indicating what will be done after the SOW is signed, prior to installation in the NPAC. This will be discussed on the Cross-regional conference call. The only traceable occurrence that the NPAC can report upon is the number of aborts. Neustar would like to know what the expectation regarding implementation on the service provider side is? Most service providers do see the value in implementation on the service provider side.

• Invalid Departure Time Discussion – Neustar

John Pope Neustar was here to facilitate the discussion. He presented a handout, which will be sent out with the minutes. In the discussion he stated that there appeared to be no direct relationship between CMIP departure times and the 1X 15-timer change. He gave known reasons for invalid departure time failures. 1) Attempt to violate system security. 2) Systems clocks may not be synchronized. - This occurs when a SP is in the process of initiating hookup with the NPAC or when a system does maintenance changes that could cause the clocks to de-synchronize. The sending system may queue the request for longer than 5 minutes due to system load. The NPAC system may queue the request for longer than 5 minutes due to system load. The question was asked if checks for the departure time are being done before or after the key exchange. Both are security checks and would occur within a very short timeframe. During heavy volumes the TCP/IP queue backs up and the departure time expires before the NPAC can service the request. There are several factors that may cause the NPAC to be unable to service the request. Service provider queries, recovery mode processing from aborts, invalid departure time, 3x5 retry timeouts, provider aborts, SOA message queuing request in excess of NPAC capability, duplicate service provider requests, etc. resulting in greater system load. There are situations that are directly related to resources (i.e. large ports and large queries at the same time). The recovery of SOA notifications that was implemented with the 2.0 release appears to be a major reason as to why the invalid departure time issue is greater post 2.0 implementation. SOA message queuing occurs when SOA recovery is not done after a SOA abort and the SOA sends queries to the NPAC to recover data sent during the down time. Resynch recovery of notifications instead of queries to the NPAC creates an unexpected load factor. There was no requirement that a Service Provider has to implement all features that are developed through the NPAC. Prior to 2.0 SOAs were not capable of query notifications, queries were done to the SVs only. The intent of the feature was to provide better information to the SPs and to increase productivity. A query is a linked reply while the notification recovery is not a linked reply. The notification recovery can cause a performance production issue. The NPAC does not believe that the platform is an issue in the performance of the NPAC. Past observation of NPAC logs, etc. have suggested that an unexpectedly large volumes of non-porting request are being sent to the NPAC. These include mass change requests, individual and range TN query requests, and large numbers of resynch network data and resynch sv data requests from re-association requests. LSMS modifys are a large portion of the activity that is going on in the NPAC compared to creates and activates. This is partially due to the fact that modifications to active subscriptions by the LTI and some SOAs cannot be done in ranges; they have to be done on a SV by SV basis. This might be an explanation of the discrepancy between the quantity of modifiys and activates.

Service providers indicate that there is a need to see an overlay of NPAC activity and the invalid departure time incidents. Service providers indicated dissatisfaction with the fact that Neustar has provided no conclusions and no recommendations as to cause and correction of the issue. That was what Neustar promised to deliver to the WG on the call on the 25^th. Neustar’s response was that not all the answers are available today. They do have a CPID departure time failure trial with one SP with timeout set to 20 minutes is underway. They will evaluate the results of that trial in 30 days. Neustar will perform additional monitoring and reporting. The results of that trial need to be out by the end of next week to the WG.

Transaction Mix – Neustar will perform additional monitoring and reporting, guidelines and or recommendations will be developed after additional data is obtained. Neustar will provide updated reports to LNPA WG every 2-4 weeks. The next report update will include additional data from any invalid departure time occurrences, additional transaction mix data, and association restart data. The change in the retry timer to a 1x15 is recent (<1month) however, Neustar reports that some data indicates that at least 1 retry, i.e. 2X8 might be more effective. Some carriers are indicating that the fact that there are no resends may be creating additional problems. Some service providers are stating that the re-synch required after an abort is more difficult than the retry. The WG has already requested data regarding performance for the time period of 30-days prior to the implementation of the 1x15 timer change and the 30-day period after the implementation of the 1x15 timer.

It is the consensus of the service providers that a definitive commitment was made on the conference call last week to have a solution to the problem presented at this meeting. It is the consensus of the service providers that Neustar has not fulfilled that commitment. In response to Service Provider questions, John Pope stated that he knows a lot more now but that the increase in knowledge has not led to a solution. The service providers again indicated that there was an expectation of Neustar’s presenting a solution to the problem at this meeting. The only thing that Neustar will commit to is a continual report of what is going on and stated that eventually they may have a solution. They have open trouble reports regarding the invalid departure time issue. Ameritech requested that the invalid departure time issue be changed from a trouble report to a defect. Neustar does not feel that this is definitely a defect and has reservations about placing this on the defect list. Ameritech feels that this should be treated as a defect so that Neustar has an obligation to correct the problem. There was concern expressed about the potential for Neustar to study the problems forever with no resolution of the issue. There was a request for a target date for a schedule of resolution of problem. Neustar feels that they will have more information on the 17^th about the service provider trial and the 1x15 change as well as recommendations towards a solution. The next report will be at the April LNPA WG meeting. There is a clear expectation from the WG that there will be concrete recommendations from Neustar at that meeting.

• November 2002, Wireless LNP Effects on LNP – Steve Addicks

MCI Worldcom presented a concern regarding the potential affects of the implementation of wireless LNP in conjunction with a ruling that no longer mandates wireless carriers to allow resellers access to their switches. There might be a potential for extremely large porting volumes as resellers may be required to relocate their customer base from one facilities provider to another. Brian Egbert (Sprint PCS) indicated that the wireless industry did not foresee any mass migrations involving resellers occurring at that time.

• Wireless/Wireline Integration 3^rd Report (NANC Discussion continued)

A wireless E911 document was presented by Anna Miller and Brian Egbert, relating the current E911 process as it relates to a wireless provider. Through this discussion, it was discovered that the wireless and wireline 911 processes do not match in regards to activities. It was proposed that the WG request assistance from NENA to review the three alternatives that were expressed in the second report and provide guidance in resolution of E911 problems. The Co-Chairs were tasked with the responsibility of contacting NENA and making arrangements for their attendance at the next WG meeting.

On Bridge:
Beth Watkins

• New Business

Brian Egbert proposed that the WG consider implementing wireless modems in the meetings to enable better distribution of documents among the members during meetings.

• NPAC SMS Release Status (Rel 3.0)

Release 3.0 appears to be on schedule for implementation. There do not appear to be any jeopardy items on the timeline. There is a meeting April 10^th for M&P review for 3.0.

• Review of Project Plan for Release 4.0 – Marcel Champagne

Neustar has received the request for a SOW for release 4.0. They are in the process of responding to that SOW. Marcel asked for a discussion of mandatory ITP testing. To test or not to test, that is the question. The general assumption is that each vendor should test any interface changes. Vendors present questioned the value of the ITP testing by the vendor. They also wanted to know if a vendor would be required to test each arrangement that they have with each service provider. Through discussion, it was determined that discussing testing without any parameters was non-productive. An action item was assigned to Marcel: write up ITP testing rules for vendors. That will be discussed on a conference call on the 16^th. Shelly Shaw to establish conference bridge and email notice to WG.

• Review key points to report to NANC – Charles/Shelly

3^rd report to NANC
PIM update
Slow Horse Update
NPAC Release status