LNPA Working Group Meeting Schedule
August 9-12


ATT Wireless
ATT Building
819 SW Oak
Portland, OR

 

LNPA Working Group
Tuesday, 8/10, 1 PM to 5 PM,

No bridge was available on the first day of the meeting due to technical difficulties within the facility.

There were slight changes to the previous minutes. Those changes were made and the minutes will be resubmitted as an attachment to these minutes.

Anna gave the wireless presentation in regards to wireless participation in pooling. She did not receive any action items from NANC in regards to pooling. There seemed to be a general understanding of the limitations that would be placed upon wireless pooling, and that at this time wireless participation was not viable. There were questions as to individual wireless participation being accelerated based on vendor capabilities and any impact that would have on the entire wireless industry. This discussion led itself back to the WNP conclusion that at this time acceleration of wireless pooling is not a viable option.

Charles presented the LNPA WG report to NANC. There was discussion regarding the PIM, the second report and the slow horse issue. The WG was given action items from NANC regarding PIM and the Slow Horse issue. Those action items were distributed to the group with last month minutes. They will be addressed during the time allotted for the related issues on the agenda. The co-chairs are to be prepared for discussion of the second report at the next meeting.

Timeline – more detail was added. Reseller issue – close this issue at the next meeting. September is the deadline to submit contributions to support changes to the status quo. If no contributions are received, the status quo of the wireline carriers will be applied. See Anna’s minutes. Open up discussion with regional operations teams regarding the Intercarrier testing. An updated timeline will be sent out with information regarding the intercarrier testing. The information will be sent out to the operations teams by the end of the week. There will be a three-day discussion in September regarding test case and test plan development.

The last meeting revolved around the development of the report to NANC that the group had been tasked with. This meeting will be involved in the initial development of LSMS requirements. LM had an action item from the last meeting to bring an outline of LSMS requirements to the meeting scheduled on Thursday.

One LLC (MidAtlantic) has accepted the accelerated pooling release schedule. The 47-week schedule has begun. Release 3.0 will be available to service providers for testing in June 2000. The other LLCs have either failed to approve the accelerated pooling release schedule or have not yet voted on the issue at the time of this meeting.

Marcel (Lockheed Martin) was not prepared to discuss the definition of a release today. This will be added to tomorrow’s agenda.

At the Cross-Regional, feedback was requested from this group in regards to the impact of service providers electing not to test when a new release is ready for deployment. There are service providers who have elected not to test with release 2.0. After much discussion, the LNPA WG moved to recommend that all service providers should perform a minimum set of regression tests for all new releases. This group will convey the recommendation to the Cross-Regional forum.

The SE LLC has asked for more participation by the LLCs in the change management process. This appeared to be a result of a misunderstanding of the communication that was sent to the LLCs regarding the change management process. Since the purpose of the original letter was to request input from the LLCs on this process, it was decided that a second letter needed to be sent to the LLCs to indicate that a response is being solicited from them on the change management process flows. Once this group has received input from the LLCs the process flows will be updated as necessary. It was also decided to include in the letter to the LLCs an invitation to participate in the prioritization of change orders during the next meeting.

Wednesday, 8/11, 8:30 am - 5 PM,

On Bridge:
Dave Cowgill TTI
Jackie Klare SBC/PacBell

239 – Document current processing for resynchronization
268 – Documentation change for Mass update
269 – Documentation change for Bulk data download. There are additional changes that need to be made to this change order. Those will be made and this will be discussed at the next meeting.
270 – Documentation change for re-send.
291 – SSN edits in the NPAC SMS. This was postponed due to the lack of a conference bridge. Action item to all participants: examine the possibility of separation of LIDB and CNAM from CLASS and ISVM in what types of data can be exchanged.

Action Item: Resolve issue regarding specific pooling requirement not matching SIE block behavior matrix

Prioritization of Change orders:

Utilize matrix that currently exists to determine level of effort from vendors and LM.
Develop drop-dead date for all prioritization to be complete.
Develop schedule of prioritization based on the drop-dead date.
The Co-chairs will put together a letter to the LLCs announcing that the prioritization schedule has begun and that requirement development should begin in November.

During the testing of 2.0, a problem was discovered with the edit on the time parameter. Beth, (ATT) proposed a change order (293) that would allow for the following:

If both porting parties utilize short timers, there will be an edit on both the time and the date. In all other timer scenarios and combinations, the edit will be on the date only.

It is suggested that once the change order has been created, that it be viewed internally by the service providers for confirmation that the change order alleviates the timer issue that has arisen.

There was a second change order proposed to eliminate the conflict that occurs when a subscription is created after 7:00 PM. Due to the NPAC operations being based on GMT, the subscription is set to be created the next day rather than being created on the same day.

Due to multiple solutions to this date issue, it was suggested that each be developed and presented at the next meeting.

Process Flow
There was a proposal in step 8 that the verbiage be changed from should to must. Ameritech and Bell Atlantic were the two carriers voting for the change in wording. Consensus was to leave the language as is. There were changes to blocks 16, 19 and 23. Dave Garner will update the flows and they will be provided with the minutes.

Cover Letter
Minor grammatical change was made to the cover letter.

Scope
Proposed scope document was changed and will be distributed with the minutes.

Issue 1 – Service Provider Maintenance Window

Nextlink did not submit issue due to concern about conflict with Slow Horse agenda. Discussion with group led to confirmation that the issue will be submitted to the WG with the proposal that it be worked through the Slow Horse group for resolution.

Issue 2 – Multiple Service Provider Porting Flow

SBC presented the following issue (see attached document) NANC process flows do not address the scenario where multiple service providers are involved as either the old service provider or the new service provider, but are not a network or facilities based provider.

This issue was submitted to and accepted by the LNPA WG. This will be an agenda item for next month’s meeting.

Thursday, 8/12, 8:30 am – noon,

Agenda

On Bridge
Colleen Collard

Marcel gave the NPAC status. There is a point release for 1.4 being issued this weekend. There was a problem with the way the NPAC was receiving queries from service providers. The NPAC was blocking queries from service providers. There was a change made to prevent this from occurring (1.4.0.6). This will also be applied to 2.0. 2.0 will be installed in the Midwest region this weekend as well as (2.0.1.3). The SOW for release 3.0 has been accepted and work has begun on release 3.0. Y2K - 2.0 has been certified in the lab, the entire NPAC will be re-certified after 2.0 has been installed in all the regions.

Marcel took an action item to return to the next meeting with information regarding the profile information that was sent out for 2.0.

Quiet time discussion: There was discussion regarding what was involved in the quiet time. It was decided to go forward with the existing statement, with the following clarifications.

The LNPA WG recommends that there be no changes to the NPAC/SMS production hardware or software from 11/1/1999 until 3/1/2000, except corrections for specific Y2K problems or production impacting problems (i.e., Severity 1).

This would have the following implications; new service providers would only be able to access the NPAC via dial up access to the LTI or through an existing service bureau’s connectivity. This would limit the ability of new service providers to implement and test any new connectivity during the quiet time.

Education

It was proposed that a letter be submitted to the NANC, the heads of the various industry groups represented there, and the chairs of the operations teams to socialize the process and its availability. The letter will contain instructions on accessing the PIM Documentation (i.e. scope, flows, forms, etc.) on the NPAC Web site. The LNPA WG feels this would be sufficient information for instruction to anyone wishing to submit an issue form.

There was discussion on how it would be best to receive and handle PIM issues. It was proposed that the team look at forming a sub committee to evaluate submitted issues prior to the entire WG. This was left to be evaluated in the future as more issues are submitted to the WG. It was recommended that the agenda be modified to allow for PIM to be a standing agenda item with a standing start time of Tuesday at 2:00. This was accepted and PIM will become a standing agenda item.

 

There were no un-addressed action items

Marcel presented the following to document LM’s release definition.

Starting with Release 2.0 the NPAC SMS software release number will be Version X.Y.Z.W as follows:

X – Will only be incremented when a new major release of the NPAC SMS system is authorized. It will contain only the Change Orders that have been authorized for inclusion in this new major release. Any interface modification would qualify a particular release as a major release.

Y – Will only be incremented when a new sub-release of an existing release X is authorized. It will contain only the Change Orders that have been authorized for inclusion in this new sub-release. This number will be reset to 0 when X is incremented.

Z – Will be incremented when a maintenance release is introduced to the system. This type of release does not contain authorized change orders, but rather provides general improvements to the system. This number will be reset to 0 when X or Y is incremented.

W – Will be incremented when a point release is introduced to the system. This type of release does not contain any authorized change orders, but rather introduces a fix(es) required to correct an specific problem encountered in the system. This number will be reset to 0 when X, Y or Z is incremented.

For example, the first release of the Release 2 NPAC SMS software will be numbered 2.0.0.0. If a maintenance release is introduced in the next release it will be numbered 2.0.1.0. If authorized requirements are then added to Release 2 that require NPAC SMS software changes (non-interface affecting) then the next release will be numbered 2.1.0.0.

With this definition, there was continued discussion regarding proposal 4 which was the definition that had majority support at the last meeting. There was still no consensus as to a definition

Proposal 4

A release and associated point releases (e.g., 3.0, 3.x.x, 3.x.x.x, and so on) must be backwards compatible to the prior major release (e.g. 2.0). Only a major release will contain functional interface changes between NPAC and SP SOA/LSMS.

 

Updates were made to the issue matrix

Scheduling First Half of Next Year’s meetings
January – Las Vegas Nextlink
February – San Diego PacBell
March – Denver ESI
April –
May –
June -

Project Manager for Release Schedule

John Malyar (Telecordia) proposed that a project manager be appointed to manage the new release schedule so that we can meet our scheduled goal of two releases a year. Donna recommended that we wait until we have LLC buy in on the new schedule prior to implementing a project manager. It was decided to review and return to this at the next meeting.

PIM
Slow Horse
Second report
Issue matrix

Next Meetings … September 13-16, Chicago, IL (Ameritech host)


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