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Comcast Customer Service
This is one of those stories that is tough to even set up. I was pretty amazed when I heard about it. Apparently according to the AP, LaChania Govan said she got bounced around by her cable company when she called to complain. She made dozens of calls and was even transferred to a person who spoke Spanish - a language she doesn't understand.
But when she got her August bill from Comcast she had no trouble understanding she'd made somebody mad. It was addressed to "Bitch Dog."
"I was like you got to be freaking kidding me," said Govan, 25. "I was so mad I couldn't even cuss."
Comcast officials said it shouldn't have happened.
"We only use the actual customers names on the bill," said Patricia Andrews-Keenan, a Comcast spokeswoman.
Company officials went through the records and identified two people who were involved with the name change and fired them, Andrews-Keenan said. It's unknown why the employees did it.
This is pretty amazing to me. I have never heard of anything like this and the concept of it was intriguing. How could Comcast even protect customers from such a thing? I suppose they could have all profanity in name changes filtered out but then again spammers are experts at bypassing these rules. How may e-mails do we all get with profanity in the subject that is just spelled differently, separated by dashes, etc. All in all this is a pretty embarrassing situation for any company and I know Comcast spends a good amount of money on its call center personnel so I’m surprised this happened. Like I have written before, a few bad apples can ruin it for all.
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Excel Buys Brooktrout
Wow, first Howard Bubb left Intel/Dialogic, Mike Ross left Aculab, and now Eric Giler is leaving Brooktrout. This may leave Brough Turner at NMS as one of the last holdouts in the CTI/VoIP media processing market. I should point out that we still have Peter Karneef and Jim Pinard at Pika Technologies and of course Allan Pound the founder of Aculab who has recently been much more visible in the market since the release of the company’s Prosody X board is also a well-known industry veteran.
More recently there are other strong players in this space as well like AudioCodes, Eicon ad Spirit DSP.
What prompted Eric to leave Brooktrout is unknown (he looks as healthy as ever and I’ve known him since around 1990) but an acquisition of Brooktrout by Excel provided an opportunity for him to move on. Eric has always been great to work with and the industry will feel his loss.
The competitive landscape of the media processing board market also known as the DSP resource board market hasn’t changed too much over the years but we used to have Dialogic, NMS, Rhetorex, Pika and Brooktrout all competing had to head. It was vicious competition but also civil.
These companies used to try to outdo each other at events like the Computer Telephony show over the years. It was fun to watch and report on.
Rhetorex changed hands a few times and eventually got picked up by Brooktrout. Dialogic got picked up by Intel. And now this.
One wonders what the reason was for Brooktrout to sell. They seem to be doing well – especially with their SnowShore division. They had lots of activity at their booth at the recent TMC VoIP Developer Conference as well.
Here are some excerpts from the release that might shed some light on the issue:
"We are pleased to announce this strategic transaction, which provides
great value to our stockholders," said Eric Giler, CEO of Brooktrout. He
continued, "This transaction also offers Brooktrout a unique opportunity to
better serve the current and future needs of its customers and partners."
Marc Zionts, CEO of Excel, said, "This combination will help us create one
of the largest, broadest, and deepest enabling technology product lines in the
communications equipment industry. Together, Excel and Brooktrout will be
better able to address customers' needs, providing them with a wide variety of
choice from a single, world-class vendor. Our increased scale will hasten the
development of new features and platforms and better serve the efforts of our
partners to quickly and efficiently bring new products and services to
market."
Management of Brooktrout will remain committed to working diligently to
meet all customer needs. Following the closing, Mr. Zionts will serve as CEO
of both Brooktrout and Excel.
The transaction will be financed through a combination of equity
contributed by investors in EAS Group including Oak Investment Partners,
TowerBrook Investors, L.P., and Anshutz Investment Company, with debt
financing provided by Comerica Bank. The board of directors of Brooktrout has
approved the transaction and recommended to Brooktrout's stockholders that
they adopt the agreement. The transaction is subject to various conditions,
including approval by the stockholders of Brooktrout and other customary
closing conditions. A special meeting of Brooktrout's stockholders will be
scheduled as soon as practicable following the preparation and filing of proxy
materials with the SEC.
EAS Group's investors include Oak Investment Partners, TowerBrook
Investors, L.P., and Anshutz Investment Company.
Jefferies Broadview, a division of Jefferies & Company, Inc., acted as
financial advisor to Brooktrout. Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated, acted as
financial advisor to EAS Group. Wilmer Cutler
acted as legal advisor to Brooktrout, and McDermott Will & Emery LLP acted as
legal advisor to EAS Group.
As Greg Galitzine points out in his blog entry, On the surface it actually makes sense. There's not too much overlap between the two, and the coverage of enterprise and service provider (for the combined company) makes a great deal of sense. This purchase makes sense to me as well but I am looking forward to further clarification. Good luck to Eric and his team as well as the fine people over at Excel Switching. I wish you all continued success!
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Teletruth on SBC IPTV
Bruce Kushnick has got to be the most painful thorn in the sides of the RBOCs. His tone may be confrontational for some but he makes some good points below. I would love to get the response from the RBOCs on this.
----------------------------
Bruce Kushnick has got to be the most painful thorn in the sides of the RBOCs. His tone may be confrontational for some but he makes some good points below. I would love to get the response from the RBOCs on this.
----------------------------
Teletruth News Analysis. SBC's IPTV Lies: Do the Math --- Wed Aug 17th,
2005
USA Today's "SBC's $4 billion IPTV investment 'not much money'"
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/gear/2005-08-16-iptv-sbc_x.htm
SUMMARY: MATH.& HISTORY
Based on history, Teletruth believes SBC is misleading the public by making claims it knows can't be true. They claim 18 million homes in 3 years will be rewired at a cost of $4 billion for "IPTV" -- video services using the IP networks.
--- That comes to.$222 a household for deployment of a fiber optic based new service.
It is pure fantasy. And the equipment doesn't even work today. ---History points to SBC simply making stuff up to change laws in their favor.
====================
The title of this USA Today article is correct, --- $4 billion is not much money and SBC can not be trusted to either spend the money or deploy the technology.
Welcome to fantasy island. I can say this based on the history of SBC to deploy technology as promised.
Let's put some facts on the table. In the 1990's, Pacific Bell, Ameritech, SNET, and Southwestern Bell all had plans to rewire the 13 states with fiber optics -- Pac Bell promised to spend $16 billion with 5 million households by 2000, SNET $4.5 billion, Ameritech would have 6 million households -- and the total number of households to be wired in these
13 states was ---- over 12 million lines by 2000!
And customers paid for these networks through changes in state deregulation -- massive financial incentives were given to the phone companies per state.
When SBC took over -- merged with -- Pac Bell, Ameritech, and SNET, SBC closed down every fiber optic plan. Trashed or sold off everything. There went the fiber optic future for 125 million people -- 40% of the
But hope springs eternal, as part of the Ameritech-SBC Agreement in 1999, SBC stated it would spend $6 billion to rewire the states, known as "Project
Pronto"---- Another flop. Never completed, much of the money unspent.
And now, SBC claims it will rewire and offer IPTV (which requires broadband based on fiber optic networks).
Do the math -- It's simply ridiculous!
It comes out to 6 million homes a year --- at a cost of ----- $222.22 per household.... Please stop laughing.
Anyone acquainted with this business knows that it cost more than $222 per household to rewire, much less supply the technology needed for IPTV -- which is new and has been deployed sporadically in other countries.
USA Today writes: "Indeed, nobody knows how IPTV will behave once it is "scaled," or rolled out, to millions of paying customers. One of the largest IPTV installations in the world is in
And the real kicker -- The stuff doesn't work today, but they can make statements to show how SBC is delivering on broadband.
Getting it perfect right out of the box is critical."
Around the country, the
Worse, SBC is planning on getting larger, now merging with AT&T.
Why hasn't anyone investigated how the previous mergers SBC-Ameritech-SNET-Southwestern Bell, raised rates and harmed broadband deployments and competition. SBC was supposed to be competing in 30 cities outside these regions with wireline competition
-- that never happened either.
For a decade of
http://www.newnetworks.com/BroadbandandDSL.htm
Bruce Kushnick, Teletruth
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Who Will Google Acquire?
Google will be selling 14.2 million class A shares of common stock in an effort to raise money for acquisitions. I wonder, who would Google want to buy? Here is a list of possible items on the search engine king’s menu.
Skype: The idea that Google would do very well purchasing Skype has been floating around the Internet for a while. Where are the synergies? At the end of every search, Google could have an ad that says, “Call 200 million people for free by clicking here.” It seems that Google has to get into VoIP to stay competitive with Yahoo! And MSN. They don’t need Skype but it would make life easier to purchase the company that makes the software program that hundreds of millions of people have downloaded.
Red Hat: If your number one competitor is Microsoft you need to buy Red Hat so that you can own the leading Linux platform in the world. It is that simple. This is where Google needs to be.
Oracle: Google would likely have to pay 75 billion dollars or more for Oracle. Although I think this would be a great company to buy, Google probably can’t afford them and this may be too large of a company to easily absorb. It is also a bigger company than Google which presents more challenges. Also Larry Ellison may never allow it. If Ellison was to stay on after the acquisition, he would clash with Google management for sure. The reason it makes sense is that again, we are talking about a company that hates Microsoft and fights with them tooth and nail in the database software business and a myriad of other areas.
Adobe: The company that invented PDF and with the Macromedia acquisition the company that also invented Flash. There are a slew of web and print design tools in this company’s archives in addition to many development tools. Microsoft is trying to nullify the PDF format with competing formats of their own and it is only a matter of time before the Redmond Giant will take on Flash. Now is a great time for Adobe to sell to Google so that they can be insulated from Microsoft competition. It may be fair to say that Google has as much reach into our lives as Microsoft does. Perhaps more. If Google backs a standard, it will be tough for Microsoft to ever unseat it.
WebEx: The company’s market cap is 1.2 billion dollars. Google could pick this company up easily and web conferencing make s great tie in to the other Google products and services. It also gives the company the ability to go up against Microsoft LiveMeeting.
Buying Asian: The wild card here is that Google loves its business model and will strengthen it by purchasing other search engine companies that are strong in other parts of the world like Asia or
As a Service: Google is in the position to sell lots of different hosted services from hosted e-mail to just about anything and everything else In the next year or so I expect them to start launching more mainstream applications as services. This should be an easy money-maker for the company. Who would they acquire to help them do this? I am not sure but there are a number of smaller players that could help.
Out of all the companies that have been in Microsoft’s crosshairs, there are two that seem unscathed. One is AOL… MSN as a paid ISP never really hurt AOL that much. the other is Google. There seems to be no way for The Redmond software company to compete with Google in its core model. If Google can keep on innovating and expanding it will likely be tougher still. The only thing Google has to look out for is losing focus on its core search market. It has to make sure that it is 100% focused on this market as we all saw what happened to Yahoo! And AltaVista when they lost focus on search. Google’s competition is after all, always a click away.
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