Points of presence

Written on 4:15 PM by ooe

Once registration has been completed the LLU operator can order physical collocations or distant locations from the BT exchanges in the geographical areas in which they are interested. At each intended point of presence, a two-stage survey and building process with identified timescales was agreed. This was necessary to establish an audit trail should queries arise.

When LLU was initially launched more than 40 operators registered an interest and there was clearly potential for a large volume of collocation orders. The OPF group agreed that a process was required to manage this bow wave of orders before demand settled down and business as usual processes could be adopted. A demand management process was devised, which was to be operated by the Electoral Reform Society and Oftel, to decide in which order BT would tackle equipping its exchanges. This process was put in place in September 2000. In fact the volume of orders was massively below the industry forecast level and BT was able to handle them without using the bow wave. From December 2000, LLU operators were able to order distant location on a business-as-usual basis. Based on a fuller understanding of what was practicable, in February 2001, BT announced that it could handle demand for collocation space as business-as-usual.