Recently in Wireless Category

Telemarketing is rarely in the news these days, and that's a good thing. The advent and acceptance of Do Not Call (DNC) and predictive dialer abandonment regulations in the U.S. and Canada appear to have had the intended effects. That is they have lowered--but not eliminated--annoying calls that had turned off more customers and had prompted them to spend their money elsewhere that they had attracted and revenue generated.

In doing so the DNC legislation also saved the telemarketing industry and the jobs it creates. So ticked off were lawmakers who were being bombarded with consumer complaints that they didn't care about the risk of employment losses. And that's unusual for politicians.

Tom Cardella, founder of Thomas M. Cardella Associates, and one of the teleservices industry's leading lights, called it right in a recent article on TMCnet:

"There has been much hand-wringing about the effects of the national Do Not Call list. It has been blamed by some as the cause of huge job losses in the teleservices industry."
 
"I don't agree. Those jobs would have been gone anyway because consumers were getting annoyed with unwanted calls and were hanging up, not answering, and otherwise not buying, which was making outbound teleservices more costly and less profitable."

Concerns about annoying telemarketing calls appear to have been superseded by more pressing worries: like keeping jobs including in teleservices, hence the interest in preventing more them from going offshore and bringing those back that have left.

That does not mean that telemarketing is finally free of hassles, and resulting attention of lawmakers. Because there continues to be other aggravating and costly-to-consumer telemarketing practices which are on their radar screens. Once the big targets of the economy and employment have been knocked off it is a safe bet that they will turn their sights to these issues such as:

1. Random calling and DNC list abuse. Fraudsters and greedy, irresponsible if lawful businesses are or are paying teleservices companies to make random calls even to individuals who put their names on DNC lists. Some have used the DNC lists to make calls

2. Continuing stupid telemarketing/outbound practices. High on the list: not having their names show up and 'Number Unavailables' on called parties' Caller ID

Yes, stupid. Many consumers use Caller ID to screen calls. If they don't know who the caller is they don't answer. And consumers are getting ticked off at the dumb firms who don't let them know who they are. Many would no doubt love to see those practices banned or deploy a ready tech fix that blocks all unidentified calls with the option of programming from phones or computers lists of acceptable numbers.

3. Calling to wireless numbers. Prohibited except for emergencies and or if there is prior express consent, this issue is much more problematic as more people are using, forwarding calls to, and increasingly ripping out their landlines (like the infamous definitely don't-do this-at home T-Mobile ad with the woman chainsawing telephone [actually 3-phase power, no phone lines] poles) for wireless.

The FCC is looking at, in response to a petition filed by Paul D.S. Edwards, whether creditors can place autodialed or prerecorded message calls to a telephone number associated with wireless service that was provided to the creditor initially as a telephone number associated with landlines.

It will be interesting to see how the FCC rules on this issue. Requiring express consent for all wireless calls including ported will accelerate wireless adoption--and be a boon to cell firms.

Yet regulators are usually loath to let rules stand in the way of legitimate activity such as collecting debts, and to let those who have such obligations to hide behind regulatory language to avoid meeting them.

There is also the issue of fairness to businesses who in good faith call landlines only to have the transmissions answered on cellphones.

Does the FCC open the gates to wireless users, who pay for their inbound calls, to receive many more calls on their devices at their expense by providing such 'safe harbors' for creditors and others e.g. telemarketers making lawful calls via autodialers?

Or does it decide to go beyond the Do Not Call list and make all outbound calls opt-in with express consent because such calls, wanted, undesired but lawful and proper i.e. collections, and unwanted cost consumers money?

Steve Brubaker, senior vice president, corporate affairs of InfoCision, a leading teleservices firm, pointed out in a recent blog and had informed the FCC that "it is ludicrous to think that a consumer would want to abolish all existing business relationship pertaining to a phone number just because he or she moved the number from their home phone to their cell phone.  Think about it... if the petition goes through, then every consumer that wants to retain its existing business relationships, and allow those companies to call it using that same phone number would have to contact those companies to give them express consent to do so.  What a waste of consumers' time!

"And we're not just talking about collection and solicitation calls, but also notifications of credit card fraud, interruptions in telecommunication service, and many other issues of which the consumer typically wants to be notified. 

"In addition, the detailed lists that teleservices companies like InfoCision have painstakingly built over time would be rendered useless, unless we contacted each of the consumers on the lists by some other method to reestablish consent to be contacted by their recently ported cell phone number.  It would be nearly impossible and terribly expensive to undertake such a task."

There has been a powerful call for industry self-regulation to handle issues such as these. It can and has been argued that had there been an effective self-regulatory regime 10-15 years ago the present DNC and other rules could have been avoided.

The advocates of this viewpoint are correct in one sense: developing best practices standards, educating the industry on them, and backing them with penalties such as expulsion from trade organizations that adopt these standards can and will reduce violations. There has been excellent work in this area by the American Teleservices Association through its SRO (Self-Regulatory Organization) and by the Canadian Marketing Association (CMA).

There is certainly a need to get and keep the legitimate players on their toes. Witness the recent regulatory actions involving certain cable and satellite entertainment firms, whose names need not be repeated here.

The CMA has one of the most stringent set of telemarketing best practices/self-regulation there is. The CMA, unlike its U.S. counterparts, has taken a smarter, more politically astute approach to regulations. Instead of confrontation and foot dragging it took an accurate reading of the situation and chose to work with elected officials and departments. It got what it wanted including the canning of a proposal to include B2B in Canada's DNCL.

Yet not even the CMA was able to forestall regulations or prevent ongoing telemarketing problems. That's because of the biggest weakness of self-regulation in this industry which is the lack of barriers to entry. Anyone can set up a telemarketing business and many do, and they don't have to join a trade organization and many don't. Their clientele could care less, especially those that don't mind them working the gray areas in boosting results.

The CMA has shown one way forward and that is to create or set the basis for doable legislation. Most of the CMA's best practices, including calling hours got adopted into Canada's revamped telemarketing laws.

In doing so the CMA has followed the route of many other organizations in creating consensus rules and standards that have become accepted and enforceable regulations. For example the offices that we work in have been wired in accordance with legally mandated electrical codes and government workplace safety regulations that have their origin in private consensus standards such as ANSI in the U.S. and the CSA in Canada.

To ensure that the next set of regulations that will be coming down the pipeline from legislators are fair and effective the telemarketing industry needs to devise some solutions of their own, use their self-regulatory mechanisms to test them and build consensus and at the same time sit down with lawmakers to go over these issues. That the industry is already taking proactive steps to come up with answers that could offer them guidance acknowledges the pain the lawmakers are getting from their constituents, which gets them onside.

In that fashion, by working together the industry and government will have a fair set of future rules that address needs which everyone can live with.

UPDATE:

The Canadian government has introduced Bill C-27, Electronic Commerce Protection Act (ECPA) designed to deter spam but which also repeals the Canadian Do Not Call List, which has been criticized by privacy advocates for not doing enough to stop unwanted phone calls.

One important difference that could shape telemarketing as the legislation winds itself through Parliament: the ECPA is opt-in wheras DNCL is opt-out, as pointed out in Michael Geist's article in today's Toronto Star. I wouldn't be surprise to see telemarketing made opt-in to get rid of both the DNCL and the issue of reaching cellphones.

Now that some $7 billion+ will be spent on rural broadband expansion, thanks to President Obama's just signed $787 billion economic stimulus package, the interesting question becomes which broadband technologies, wired or wireless should be supported i.e. subsidized to deliver it.

To get at the answers let's look at the two key benefits of this program:

1. It opens the door to truly effective e-commerce to residents and businesses, thereby increasing the availability of competitively priced products and services, and enhancing the economy, and to more information and services like distance learning and telemedicine. That means less gas, vehicle wear, and time in the long drives to the nearest urban centers

2. It enables job creation in rural areas such as from telework

Many rural communities have missed out on the recent economic boom. Unemployment and underemployment have been high and is getting worse. A recent story in The Daily Yonder reports double-digit rates in many communities. The recent economic downturn has for example decreased demand for resources such as forestry products. Fewer new homes means less need for local loggers, sawmill workers, and truckers.

Telework--via broadband--enables organizations that have forward-enough management i.e. supervision-by-performance rather than by-pointing-to-heads into this excellent supply of hard working individuals. It can also save them money: $10,000 to $20,000 per agent per year and improve customer satisfaction and retention, and revenues.

Not surprisingly telework through home-based agents is emerging as a viable alternative to offshoring. The cost savings and productivity benefits through home agents have made U.S. and Canada viable competitors to other countries for call handling.

There is a wide range of existing and developing broadband technologies available. TMC Group Publisher Rich Tehrani has in a recent blog pointed to broadband over power line (BPL), along with satellite, 3G, 4G (WiMAX/LTE), and perhaps white space technology. He correctly points out that the 'jury is still out' on these choices, and for good reason.

While with the exception of satellite, whose setup can be problematic (ask a rural resident who has tried to get it going) most of these methods appear to be fine for Internet access and e-mail.

Where the issue lies, however, is with VoIP. VoIP can and has for many firms made teleworking/home-based agents possible by dramatically reducing communications costs. No more LD charges from the switch to remote workers 50+ miles away.

Yet according to conversations with firms such as inContact and MegaPath there are quality of service (QoS) issues with wireless: cellular and satellite transmission. These methods have apparently not delivered consistent high enough QoS that callers, and companies expect. There are also other obstacles to VoIP ranging from old copper and data networks to home networks, depending on who you talk to.

There has been sufficient concern with VoIP to prompt three prominent pure-play telework outsourcers: Alpine Access, Arise, and Working Solutions to prohibit VoIP by their agents. Meanwhile 'blended' teleservices firms like Convergys that permit their home agents to have VoIP can route calls to bricks-and-mortar agents.

Yet in another strike against wireless, for Internet access to work at home applications, Convergys also clearly states that "Wireless or satellite broadband does not work effectively with our desktop configuration, and therefore does not meet our requirements".

Even with the good QoS on the network there can be inconsistency. You can have two VoIP 'lines' at home, one for work and one for personal, being fed from the same source, yet the quality can be different for each.

The alternative to integrated high QoS VoIP+ data: broadband for Internet--assuming that it can support work-at-home hosted solutions--and PSTN for calls would become just as unwieldy for rural residents and businesses as it is becoming for those in more urban areas, many of whom are opting for voice/data through the same pipe.

The future of voice communication according to many experts is VoIP rather than old-fashioned PSTN. If that is the case the VoIP issue, along with the need to support intensive web-based solutions, needs to be explored and resolved before any tax dollars are handed over to companies to install rural broadband.

Rich Tehrani's superb piece on the solid shape of Nortel's carrier business, coupled with recent stories on the troubled communications/enterprise products firm got me to thinking: does Nortel's future lie in the convergence of carrier networks and hosted solutions from Fortune 500-scaled CRM to workforce management i.e. the cloud?

Companies are very interested in the hosting model because they want to get away from buying licenses and bolting in hardware just as they no longer, with few exceptions, own their buildings: to save capital costs and give them greater flexibility.

Enterprise solutions, like buildings, are infrastructure. They don't define the firms' value propositions. Instead their products, pricing, service, and their people do. Slowly, in contact centers and in other fields such as media and PR, organizations realize that they don't need buildings either, or if so, they need much less space than in the past.

The challenge for hosting i.e. the cloud, a.k.a. SaaS is reliably and seamlessly handling the huge volumes of data and interactions through it. That is why heavy-duty enterprise-scaled contact center-based or using applications such as CRM, performance management speech analytics, speech rec, and workforce management/optimization have been licensed for clients' premises, and why hosted/SaaS has been confined to SMEs.

If any firm can make enterprise-scaled hosting possible, and to make licensed premise software and bolted hardware practices of the past it is Nortel. Only Nortel has both the carrier-and-enterprise-grade engineering and expertise to make this happen. Nortel's strength in carrier landline and wireless products is not matched by any of its enterprise solutions competitors e.g. Avaya, Cisco.

The markets are there: carriers, ASPs, and CRM/ERM/database solutions firms. Nortel can easily support a mashup say between Verizon Business and an Oracle or for the Canadian market, Telus and CDC, makers of Pivotal. Hosted top-drawer solutions may provide cost-reduction/customer retention-seeking enterprises the tools they need to survive the economic climate and prepare for recovery: and likewise for the carriers offering them.

By going to the cloud, both Nortel, the carriers, solutions developers, and their customers can take flight, and grow...if nervous investors allow them.

Forget home and business computers. mCommerce is the killer app for eCommerce, and together it will enable retailers to be successful now and going forward provided it is fully integrated with the stores.

Thanks to at last the widening 3G and nascent 4G networks, and increasingly user-friendly smartphones that permit easier keying and surfing, prospects and consumers are researching and buying online, anytime, anywhere. They will want the convenience of finding a product on a website, like a must-have gift, then texting or calling the merchant and having it set aside for purchase at the nearest location, then guaranteeing it with a credit card.

The Acquity Group has correctly identified, in a recent white paper, that eCommerce will be the top channel for growth in 2009. It is seeing major department stores, specialty retailers, and manufacturers continue to invest in improving eCommerce. It says the competitiveness of these industries and the increasing demands of consumers will continue to force these organizations to invest despite economic conditions. Cuts will occur, but because of the strategic importance of the online channel it will be the last place people stop investing.

The Acquity Group says "leaders in this space see the downturn as an opportunity to gain greater market share over their competitors and continue to grow sales in their
online channel. The rest are beginning to realize the importance of this
channel as well."

What is also needed is for the smartphone makers to think bigger and come up with a device about the size of a 4x6 pic with a keyboard that can actually be used, with minimal errors, and a screen that can actually be seen (especially for those of us 40+ and who have the disposable income), for some real serious online shopping, e-mailing, and work...

'To take a walk in the snow' is a Canadian expression meaning stepping down or that a deal is dead. It dates back to when former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau stepped out into a typical winter day in Ottawa, the nation's capital, and when he came back decided to resign.

The phrase is appropriate today as there are published stories swirling amidst falling snow throughout Ontario and Quebec that a leveraged buyout (LBO) of Montreal-based Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE), the country's largest communications carrier, scheduled to close Dec.11, 2008 may be doomed.

The Globe and Mail reported an announcement by Bell that it had obtained a 'preliminary view' from KPMG that the accounting firm does not expect to deliver opinion by the close whether the deal would meet the solvency tests. It cited 'current market conditions, its analysis to date and the amount of indebtedness involved'.

The newspaper said that '"Unless this changes by that [the closing] date, BCE warned, the transaction is unlikely to proceed.'"

LBOs are excellent tools to make companies lean and efficient because the added debt burden and the need to reduce it forces firms to cut costs and grow revenues.

Unfortunately for BCE, the completion of this LBO could not come at a worse though in fairness unpredictable time as far the markets are concerned. The tightening economy is already pushing Bell to cut costs; it recently laid off staff at its Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and Hamilton offices.

The added debt may strain Bell's ability to compete with competitors in the wireless 4G or Next-Gen and other hot markets by limiting its resources. Bell, like other ILECs haven't quite figured out what to do with its legacy PSTN/TDM network regarding IP. It is losing residential landline customers to cable firms like Cogeco. Fewer dollars means less money to go all IP over copper wires (VoDSL).

Whether the LBO proceeds or not, Bell, even though it is fairly good shape, will be under pressure to merge, and so will its competitors, to expand markets and cut costs arguably truly only possible by becoming integrated coast-to-coast-to-coast 4G wireless/IP landline carriers. Expect rumors and even delivery of M&As such as Bell+Telus and Rogers+Cogeco+Shaw, but only after Bell bleeds more and becomes much less expensive to acquire.

Nortel is a proud company with an excellent reputation for innovative products, especially in the contact center and wireless spaces. Unfortunately the firm has for some years been in rough straits, with what seems to be a sadly neverending stream of cutbacks and downsizings. I live in a town where Nortel has a plant whose size, say longtime residents, is just a fraction of what it used to be.

In what seems to be an insulting blow, an analyst from RBC Dominion Securities in Canada, where Nortel is HQed, has cut its stock target to $0, reported the Globe and Mail. The story says that bankruptcy 'is a distinct possibility'.

Nortel can't keep attriting itself, and spinning or attempt to spin off its assets. At some point it has to step outside of its skin, look at it as others see it (which few companies do, lest they see some unwelcome truths, which is why this exercise is invaluable), assess its strengths and weaknesses in current and future market, and radically refocus itself.

Here are some admittedly extreme options...though in crazed times when one's back is against the wall, crazy may be the only way out

1. Decide to become king of the mature universe of premise-bases switches. Aim to put Mitel etc. out of business, one which Siemens is exiting, and buy up these outfits, divisions, and customers by selling its other lines

2. Be the cloud, for routing and telepresence. Do the reverse of 1. and focus its considerable prowess in network/cloud based routing, and get rid of premised-based switches. Do what IBM did by becoming mainly services firm and leave the low/mid-end hardware making for countries with cheap labor

3. Be wireless solutions only. Dump solutions e.g. IVR, PBXes, that do not directly plug into mobile

4. Go totally virtual except for two showcase/research head and US offices: in Ottawa (in the Confederation Heights area) and in Wilmington, Del.

Why? Power. Ottawa is Canada's capital and Confederation Heights and adjoining areas sits on or just off the main road from Parliament Hill to the airport. Make it easy for decisionmakers, supplicants, and businesses to see you and they may want to stop in. Confederation Heights is a two-minute ride on the O-Train rapid transit from Carleton University, which has an engineering school i.e. interns, recruits, cheap labor etc.

And Wilmington? Just ask Vice President-elect Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. Wilmington is a quick ride on the Senator's (now VP's) favorite mode of transportation i.e. Amtrak's Acela from the Beltway, Congress, and Philly, NYC, and Boston. Great labor force, available property, and star preference.

Imagine being able to take and make calls, receive e-mails, IMs, and SMS, and at the same time manage web-enabled applications like hosted CRM and workforce management in a convenient, go-anywhere, user-friendly wireless appliance.

Imagine no more being tangled up in cords, or fiddling with multiple (and expensive) gadgets.

Imagine having at last a truly usable phone for home workers, including contact center agents and supervisors.

The hard reality is that when you are working from home you do get interrupted, like for deliveries, plumbers, other contractors, family responsibilities: which beats productivity and cost-wise having to leave early/arrive late to handle when working in a traditional office. Such a device would enable you to stay in touch and keep on the go while signing documents, giving instructions, etc.

The reality of having such a tool may be closer than you may think: in the form of an IP-enabled iPhone that acts like a mutant cordless handset.

Give the credit and kudos to Group Publisher Rich Tehrani who revealed in his blog just before ITEXPO West how the iPhone can become the ultimate (and universal) handset via IP by using the extra wire connected to the headphone jack.

This is roughly similar in concept to the Hutchison Telecom Telepoint hybrid cordless/microcellular units marketed in the UK in the early 1990s which if you were in range of one of these base stations you could make calls. I used to live and work near Manchester, England where this was launched and saw these 'points' but I never witnessed anyone using them. You could also use the devices at home as cordless sets.

What I'd like to see is someone to bring back the Tandy TRS80-T100--the first truly functional portable computer: the ultimate tablet--with 21st centry functionality.

The T100 combined word processing, BASIC, a small but readable screen, a built-in modem, and a a rugged keyboard: features that made it the journalist's best friend. You could, using an acoustic coupler, zap files over a pay phone. I used the clamshell model, the T200, when I wrote for the Manchester (N.H.) Union-Leader over 20 years ago, and it far beat most laptops I've relied on since.

I and other journalists, programmers, and other keyboard-intensive users have been reluctant to switch over to BlackBerries, etc. because the keys and pads are too small and unforgiving for us two-fingered demons, and the screens are way too small. The tablets that have come on the market in recent years lacked usability.

What are firms like Apple, and they and other practical geniuses who can box and package proven technologies waiting for?

Here's something you don't think about very often.

When connecting to the public telephone network in the U.S., many VoIP and wireless telephone companies are essentially "riding for free," since they are not transmitting sufficient identification information to allow the traditional carriers to charge them. Apparently, this is particularly hard on rural telephone companies, which make up to 29 percent of their revenue from inter-carrier compensation (carrying traffic for another company).

One such rural provider disdains the process. Ramond Henagan, General Manager of Missouri's Rock Port Telephone, stated that some VoIP providers have refused to pay access fees by saying the FCC has "given them permission to use the networks for free because they're IP," Henagan said. "You and I both know these are regular voice calls, people talking to people. Because these companies have sprinkled IP fairy dust on them, they think they get a free ride."

You don't read the phrase "IP fairy dust" every day, do you?

Read the full piece at http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2008/04/23/3405677.htm.

TES

Twice in my life have I become teary over the death of people whom I had never met. The first was over George Harrison, as I was a fan of the "Quiet Beatle." The second time was yesterday, upon hearing of the death of Arthur C. Clarke.

It was in eighth grade...Ms. Wheeler's English class...that I was obliged to read the book "2001: A Space Odyssey." Most of my classmates approached it with dread. It had a boring cover. It had lots of science terms on the synopsis. But I was a good student, and it had been assigned, so I read it.

It began a love affair with science fiction that has lasted 26 years. Though I have branched far and wide in science fiction, from the classics -- Bradbury, Heinlen, Asimov -- to the admittedly somewhat schlocky, I held Clarke nearest and dearest to my heart. There has seldom been written a more prophetic science fiction novel than "Childhood's End" (in which Clarke predicted communication via fax and e-mail...in 1953) or a more perfect sci-fi book than "Rendezvous With Rama." My personal favorite, however, remains "The City And The Stars," a novel that takes place a billion years into Earth's future and theorizes what may come of both human technology and human social interaction.

But we have a lot more to thank Clarke for than his science fiction, as worthy a contribution as it was. It was Clarke, who was also a physicist and a mathematician, who popularized the idea via a 1945 essay entitled "Extra Terrestrial Relays" in Wireless World magazine that satellites in geostationary orbit (an orbit that allows the satellite to remain above a specific point on earth at all times) would be perfect for carrying telecommunications traffic. To this day, the orbit that telecom satellites travel in, geostationary orbit, is also known as the "Clarke orbit."

Clarke never patented the idea of the telecommunications satellite, primarily because his lawyer thought the idea was so outlandish...communication relayed to space and back to earth again...that the lawyer felt it would have been a waste of time. Clarke later recounted the error in an essay entitled, "A Short Pre-History of Comsats, Or: How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time."

Rest in peace, Sir Arthur Clarke. I, for one, will go home today and drag out my old copies of your books and be inspired.

TES

Loved this piece written by MSNBC's Tech Editor Bob Sullivan about the efforts American wireless companies have expended locking their customers into "cell phone jail." Why, in a country that is ostensibly proud to be a free market economy, do we put up with this?

There's some interesting information in the article about the rather sleazy practices the wireless companies have developed to keep customers locked up, which companies are better than others, and how you can get around some of those practices. (Did you know you don't HAVE to put up with a cell phone that is locked to only one carrier? I didn't.)

TES