Industry collaboration guides simpler contracts in the future

Clear, simple, straightforward. That's been the brief from industry for BT Wholesale's contracts, terms and conditions. And now following a programme of close collaboration and negotiation through the forum of the Consult21 Contracts Group, this has come to fruition in a re-issued Master Services Agreement (MSA) for BT Wholesale's 21CN SMP (Significant Market Power) products. It heralds the start of a 'one contract' approach for BT Wholesale products and services that should help customers save time and money.

Over the last few months the MSA's umbrella set of conditions together with the associated service schedules have been comprehensively reviewed and re-launched for the following products so far:

Multi Service Interconnect Link (MSIL)
Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC): a key element of our 21CN broadband family
IPstream Connect (IPSC).

This followed a 10-step, 6-month contract review process agreed with industry in August 2008, giving UK Communications Providers the opportunity to lodge any issues they had with the prototype MSA and service schedules first launched for MSIL in January 2008. We have taken on board and worked hard to negotiate the issues raised in that period, resolving the vast majority by January 2009 and seeking to satisfactorily address the final few over the coming weeks - ideally without recourse to Ofcom.

During this time BT Wholesale has also developed an MSA for non-regulated products. This is ready to be used on a case-by-case basis as the starting point for negotiating bespoke agreements with CPs wishing to purchase a number of BT Wholesale's non-regulated products and services.

Although the MSA project has focused on BT Wholesale's 21CN products and services, the resolution of key issues has fed into the current contract reviews for other BT Wholesale agreements: the Standard Interconnect Agreement (SIA) and Partial Private Circuits (PPCs). The learning gained with the MSA main body and service schedule contract review will help with consistency for these other products.

Speaking about the gains of taking a collaborative approach, BT Wholesale Industry Consultant Bill du Cann comments: "By making this investment in guiding the look, feel and content of contracts, customers can now be confident that the contracts will meet their needs better. There should also be important savings both for them and for BT Wholesale at contract negotiation stage as it won't be necessary to create all new contracts from scratch - something that may help our products and our customers to get to market faster."

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Like to play a part in shaping a future of simpler contracts for BT Wholesale products and services? Then please contact Bill du Cann for further details at bill.cann@bt.com. There's also information here.