Joe Spencer

Speakers: Keith Falter, Technology Information Director, AT&T Data and Internet Services; Tim Mangan, President, Softricity Inc; Joe Spencer, Product Manager Frame Relay Services, BellSouth Telecommunications

Joe SpencerProduct ManagerBellSouth Telecommunications

Joe Spencer

Joe Spencer is the product manager for Frame Relay Services at BellSouth Telecommunications.Joe has a MS in telecommunications from the University of Colorado.He also has a MBA from Vanderbilt and is working on is DBA from the University of Sarasota.He lives in Atlanta with his wife and three children.

"This puts backup in the control of network managers," says Joe Spencer, BellSouth's product manager for frame relay services."The backup site is activated only when we are notified."

BellSouth guarantees that Backup Frame Relay--priced at a one-time $125 fee--will be activated within 15 minutes after it's contacted by a customer.Provisioning is made possible through a software upgrade powering its Lucent-based frame relay network, Spencer says.

"This puts backup in the control of network managers," says Joe Spencer, BellSouth's product manager for frame relay services."The backup site is activated only when we are notified."

BellSouth guarantees that Backup Frame Relay--priced at a one-time $125 fee--will be activated within 15 minutes after it's contacted by a customer.Provisioning is made possible through a software upgrade powering its Lucent-based frame relay network, Spencer says.BellSouth currently provides frame relay service to more than 6,000 customers.

Last month MCI WorldCom trotted out a similar recovery service--Frame Shield.In the event of network congestion or delays, the service will automatically reroute a customer's frame relay traffic to an ISDN backup service and will inform customers of outages within 60 minutes after their frame relay connection has been down for a 10-minute period.That mirrors AT&T Corp.'s Multimedia Advantage program, which provides automatic notifications of service disruptions via fax, e-mail, pager or voice mail.