The introduction of WLR3 by Openreach aims to level the playing field between comms providers (CPs) and BT Retail. According to Tony Cook, a Director at Union Street Technologies, CPs should waste no time in getting on board.

WLR3 allows CPs to show their customers that they are in control of service provisioning and not dependent on BT, because service orders to Openreach are managed directly online and in real time. "CPs can now order services, see site information, book engineer appointments, reserve numbers and manage faults with access to the same features as BT Retail, and hence can enhance the service offering and SLAs that they can provide to their customers," said Cook.

"This provides some significant benefits. With WLR3 no order forecasts are required, so all orders have equal priority. Openreach engineer appointments can be booked online while the customer is on the phone to agree the date. Appointments can also be re-booked or cancelled using direct access to Openreach engineer workbooks."

"WLR3 offers the potential to provide resellers with white label and managed service solutions"

Cook highlighted that if a new line is being provisioned the number can be selected and agreed with the customer. Fault testing can be done online with the customer on the phone and CPs can pre-authorise charging limits for Openreach engineer time related billing work. "CPs with reseller partners can devolve fault management to the reseller, and WLR3 also offers the potential to provide resellers with white label and managed service solutions," added Cook.

All this is a great advance and brings enormous potential benefits to CPs. But to utilise WLR3, CPs must interface with the BT Openreach Equivalence Management Platform (EMP). "This means that CPs will need to either develop their own gateway or partner with a systems integrator that can provide a solution. We have developed our WLR3 Portal Solution to integrate fully with the Union Street aBillity billing platform, giving significant business benefits," Cook stated.

As Union Street's WLR3 uses the same user interface and database as the billing platform, there is a single entry point for all provisioning and billing requirements, significantly reducing the volume of data entry and reducing errors across the whole process. Because the WLR3 process starts within the billing platform, Union Street has been able to synchronise the provision of new services with the addition of the service charges to the client accounts.

"Most CPs on a monthly basis have the task of manually reconciling the BT service charges to ensure that everything is correctly onward billed to their customers," commented Cook. "It can be easy to make mistakes that result in miss-billing. Union Street's WLR3 solution will automatically add the appropriate charges at the point of provisioning and it uses the WLR3 messages to trigger the automatic update of the charging start dates. The result is a big saving of time and equally importantly, a reduction in errors, miss-billing and revenue loss. Union Street has included additional validation so that it is almost impossible to place an invalid order."

As a result, CPs have reported a big reduction in the time taken to process orders, compared to the old way of processing orders via the BT gateway (WLR2). According to Cook, this time saving was confirmed at a recent BT organised WLR3 ‘Real Deal' Roadshow event in the London BT Tower. Two of Union Street's customers were selected by BT as case studies for WLR3 - 2 Circles Communications and HighNet. Andy Reid from 2 Circles Communications presented an independent study his company had conducted to measure the speed of processing WLR3 assurance using the Union Street integrated solution verses the old WLR2 way of doing it via the EcoRepair portal, with separate data entry into the billing platform. He concluded that the integrated WLR3 solution saved them 60 per cent of the time on each transaction.

Cook commented: "The Union Street WLR3 Portal Solution can be used with other billing platforms, but will not provide the same level of system integration and a single point for data entry. At the moment there is some complacency in the CP community about moving to WLR3. But Openreach has a target of ending the establishment of new CPs onto WLR2 soon and the complete withdrawal of WLR2 probably by the end of the decade. Putting off the move to WLR3 is really not a sensible option."