WorldCom woes

THESE DAYS, EITHER Dayne Sampson, vice president of IT at Emeryville, Calif.-based Internet search company Ask Jeeves, or someone on his staff is in daily contact with WorldCom, the troubled telecom carrier that provides co-location services from its New Jersey facility.

With questions in the air about the effect on voice and data services -- due to the July 21 bankruptcy filing by the Clinton, Miss.-based voice and data service provider -- Sampson is monitoring the situation closely.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding WorldCom's fate, Sampson says he is prepared for any outcome from the bankruptcy. Ask Jeeves has access to more network connectivity from San Jose, Calif.-and London-based vendors. It is redundancy that ensures the company's network is always on and guarantees the availability of its Web service, which gets about 5 million hits a day. Additionally, the vice president has recently experienced the flameouts of other service providers, so he has adjusted his IT contracts and contingency plans accordingly.

With the news remaining grim in the telco sector -- the financial failings of WorldCom, Denver-based Qwest, Madison, N.J.-based Global Crossing, among them -- CTOs are paying close attention to make sure they aren't left without connectivity due to the untimely demise of their service providers.

Be prepared

Some chief technologists say they have been preparing for months for uncertainties in Internet service, data services, and bandwidth connectivity as a growing number of providers began to develop serious problems.

Immediately after WorldCom dropped a financial bomb June 25 -- reporting it hid $1.2 billion in losses by failing to report $3.85 billion in expenses and that it would lay off 17,000 employees -- Gartner issued a warning. The Stamford, Conn.-based research firm believes that more layoffs are to come, potentially reducing the telco to half its current size by mid-2003, provided the entire company or its units have not been acquired by others. Gartner is now advising WorldCom customers to make contingency plans to guarantee service while the giant telco's fate unravels.

Although experts have historically debated the relative merits of having a single network provider (to foster a close relationship) vs. having two or more carriers, now is clearly the time to have more than one provider, says Ted Chamberlin, a Gartner networking analyst.

"This advice is definitely for WorldCom customers, who have some choices to make, but also for customers of Qwest, Global Crossing, and for the remaining CLECs [competitive local exchange carriers]," Chamberlin says. "For any customer of a network service provider, the potential is there for gloomy times. So we tell our customers that having a dual-carrier strategy is essential."

Gartner also advised enterprise IT decision-makers who are currently signed up with WorldCom to delay signing up for new WorldCom services, to extend expiring contracts for only six months, to duplicate data, and to consider alternate hosts for Web sites currently hosted by WorldCom or its Digex affiliate (see "Avoiding voice/data service disruptions" ).