LNPA-WG's Slow Horse Subcommittee's participants:
Below are draft minutes of the August Slow Horse subcommittee meeting.
Please provide your comments and corrections to me, using the slowhorse @
telecomse.com distribution list, by end of August.  I will reissue the
corrected minutes for review at our September 11th session.  Please let me
know if I failed to include your company or you as attendee; I failed to
circulate attendance list on day 2.

The LNPA-WG's Slow Horse subcommittee held its regular monthly meeting
August 14th-15th at Baltimore.  The following companies were represented:

Thanks.
Steve

AT&T - Beth Watkins, Dominic Choi
    BellSouth - Ron Steen
    Bell Canada - Chris Martin
    ELI - Dennis Robbins (by conference bridge]
    ESI - Ron Stutheit
    Neustar - Gustavo Hennecke   
    Nextlink - Jamie Sharpe
    Qwest/USWest - Dave Garner
    SBC - Jim Alton, Charles Ryburn
    Sprint - Stephanie Swanson
    Tekelec - Colleen Collard
     Telcordia - John Malyar
     TSE - Jean Anthony
    Verizon - Gary Sacra, Bob Angevine
    Williams - Rick Lenox, Lana Swalls
    WorldCom - Steve Addicks, Molly Dorsey

LSMS Availability Requirement - Change Order NANC 219 and M&P
Discussion of Change Order 219 and related M&P largely deferred to full
LNPA-WG meeting later this week.  With respect to last month's minutes'
comment about short circuiting the process, it is now clear that the revised
NANC 219 change order will be reviewed by Neustar to determine whether added
% Availability report details require price adjustment.  If a change in the
price of SOW 20 (covers release 4.0 of which this change order is a part)
results from our modification of NANC 219, Neustar will notify the LLCs of
that price change. 

LSMS Performance Requirement - Some Progress
John Malyar, Telcordia, presented a proposed LSMS performance requirement
based on the NPAC performance requirement, extrapolated from the derived
NPAC broadcast capacity calculation from 336 seconds to a full hour.  (A
public version of Exhibit N from the NPAC/LLCs Master Contracts was prepared
by Neustar for the Slow Horse subcommittee's use in this effort.)  This is
material John had prepared for the subcommittee last October.
The Exhibit N NPAC performance requirement is subject to periodic review and
revision.  Thus whenever the LLCs and Neustar agree to a change in the
Exhibit N performance level, a corresponding change would be required on the
part of the service providers' systems.  Since Exhibit N deals with a series
of performance milestones, a service provider could elect to be certified
for some intermediate milestone value, and later request recertification for
higher values as necessary to keep pace with NPAC performance.
The purpose of the LSMS performance certification is not to find an upper
limit of a particular LSMS's throughput capacity, but rather it is to verify
that the LSMS performs at a some current or future milestone level.  The
level to be tested is selected by the NPAC User or its vendor.  The testing
is between the NPAC vendor's lab and either the service provider's test
system or the LSMS vendor's lab.  (The LSMS vendor might also choose to be
certified for its own business reasons.)  However the User's LSMS is tested,
there must be a certification that the LSMS configuration being tested is
equivalent to the service provider's production system.  This is analogous
to the Continuing Certification Process in place for LSMS and SOA
functionality.           

The certification that a User's test facility is equivalent to its
production system does not deal with possible differences in the network
connections involved.  While the network connection does not appear
pertinent to the testing of LSMS functionality, the network aspects may
become relevant to LSMS performance testing at some point in the future.
The LSMS performance test is not an attempt to quantify the speed with with
a service provider updates its LNP call routing database.  The test is
simply to demonstrate that a service provider's LSMS is sufficiently quick
in interacting with NPAC as activations are broadcast so as not to impair
the NPAC or other service providers' NPAC-related operations.

SOA Availability - NPAC Log Report
Neustar was asked to provide a report of NPAC-to-SOA traffic characteristics
based on information contained in the NPAC logs.  The subcommittee agreed
that the following material should be requested:
*All NPAC notifications to SOA (and LTI, if logged) summarized by
type, by SPID, for a one-month period
*All NPAC notifications to SOA (and LTI, if logged) in total,
summarized by 30-minute intervals, by SPID, for a one-month period
*All SOA/LTI requests to NPAC summarized by type, by SPID, for a
one-month period
*Number of NPAC-initiated SOA aborts, summarized by 30-minute
intervals, by SPID, for a one-month period
*Number of SOA-initiated aborts, summarized by 30-minute intervals, by SPID, for a one-month period
*Congestion indications observed by NPAC at SOA/LTI, summarized by
30-minute intervals, by SPID, for a one-month period
Neustar explained that substantial effort would be required to write
necessary scripts and obtain the required data.  It became clear that an SOW
would be expected.

Once the group confirms that the desired data request is adequately captured
above, the LLCs will be asked to request an SOW for the work.  The NPAC
scripts prepared for this should be generic so that similar requests can be
accommodated easily in the future without significant modifications being required.

Neustar was asked to determine whether:
*LTI interactions are included in the logged data
*all SPIDs or just primary SPIDs are reflected in the logged data
*these reports can be prepared without adverse impact on the NPAC's
operation.

Report to NANC - No NANC Meeting in August
Next Meeting

The next Slow Horse subcommittee meeting is scheduled for the afternoon of
September 11th and the morning of September 12th, at Washington, D.C.
immediately before the LNPA-WG meeting being held there.  The September
meeting's agenda is as follows:
*review previous month's meeting minutes
*discuss LSMS Performance Requirement - John Malyar
*discuss SOA Availability Requirement
*report on NPAC/SOA traffic report SOW - Steve Addicks
*prepare status report to NANC
*develop next meeting's agenda