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| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

March 2011

You are browsing the archive for March 2011.

Marketing Hosted PBX with Kimber

March 30, 2011

A VAR's View from the Cloud

March 30, 2011

What is a Master Agent?

March 30, 2011

A buddy of mine and I have been having a conversation for about a month about Master Agencies. We are trying to decide if there is a standard definition for the term.

Generally, a master agent has direct contracts with carriers. These typically come with hefty quotas; hence, why they need sub-agents.

Master Agencies generally perform back office support for the sub-agents.



A Little Anti-Trust Rant

March 30, 2011

A CLEC filed suit against VZ for anti-trust this week. For those of you unfamiliar with operating a CLEC, ISP or OTT VoIP company, let me explain what I have seen over 11 years of servicing this industry.

Ma Bell has long standing promotions to compete against any quote from TWT. So long standing that by now they should be tariff rates.

Tariff is what the employees of the ILEC's consistently blame everything on. Tariffs are written by the ILEC and can be changed at will.



Local CLEC Sues Verizon for Anti-Trust

March 30, 2011

AstroTel, a local CLEC in Sarasota, FL, filed the complaint in federal court in the Middle District of Florida against Verizon Communications, Inc. and Verizon Florida, LLC for repeated violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the Lanham Act, and the RICO Act.  The complaint was filed in the context of AstroTel’s Chapter 11 Reorganization which began four months earlier.  The reorganization itself is the result of ongoing contract disputes between AstroTel and Verizon Florida, LLC.

As I understand it, VZ repeatedly used CPNI information that by Federal law they are required to protect to market to AstroTel customers. The Duopoly as a whole does it.

IBM's New(er) Strategies

March 29, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

At IBM's Lotusphere this year (Feb. 1), IBM rolled out strategies for Cloud and Social Media.

IBM identified 5 ways that partners could benefit from the Cloud. They are as follows:

  1. Cloud Application Providers - deliver business apps via a subscription model through the cloud such as SAAS
  2. Cloud Builders - design, build and manage clients’ cloud needs, typically integrating with existing infrastructure.
  3. Cloud Infrastructure Providers - provide a public cloud infrastructure or Platform as a Service (PaaS) on which app can be hosted.
  4. Cloud Services Solution Providers - resell multiple public cloud services and offer complementary services such as training and integration.
  5. Cloud Technology Providers - provide the tools, services, and technologies, such as cloud management, billing metering and monitoring — that help clients use the cloud more effectively.

These are ways for VAR's to stay in the business of providing applications and associated services.

According to some PR sent my way, " IBM is the largest consumer of social technologies.

A CDN With Channel?

March 28, 2011

Image via CrunchBase

Highwinds is a CDN player out of Florida. The only reason I know them is that I track tech funding in Florida. Highwinds had a booth at the Channel Partners Expo, which made me scratch my head. Why?

CDN is really a channel opportunity.

Go Abroad

March 28, 2011

The last year or so has seen a fair amount of agent interest in global connections. The world is flat, right? Globalization and all that?

Level 3  - Can do IP-VPN and E-1s in the UK, plus international MPLS
ACC Business - International MPLS with only 1 node in the US
AboveNet - Dark fiber and big pipes in Europe
Smoothstone - Hosted VoIP layered on any MPLS network in over 23 countries.
Masergy - its MPLS backbone that can go into the Amazon Jungle.
inContact - can manage international call centers for customers.
Global Crossing has offices in Europe, Latin America, Japan, Hong Kong and Bermuda

There are many other services that an agent can sell world-wide and from a wide variety of carriers like NTT/Verio, KDDI, Ma and Pa Bell and more.









InterNAP Changes Channel

March 28, 2011

Lessons from the Keynotes

March 25, 2011

At the Service Provider Summit, there were a number of keynotes. Here are the lessons that I took away.

Corey Potts of VoIP Innovations spoke about Sales Management. It is a challenge to manage salespeople if there are not processes in place.

Progressive Mobile Tracker

March 22, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

Progressive is pushing out an automobile tracker device called Snapshot. The device attaches to your car's diagnostic port and pushes data out via M2M. Consumers can log on to check out daily stats.

With Snapshot, Progressive’s Pay As You Drive® (PAYD) insurance program,
consumers can get a discount for insurance if they "drive less, in safer ways and during safer times of day". "Your driving snapshot includes the number of miles you drive, time of day you drive and how often you make sudden stops." Big Brother, anyone?

Progressive calls it a game changer.




Marketing Your ISP

March 22, 2011

More Spectrum, More Spectrum

March 22, 2011

At CTIA today for the CEO Panel, AllThingsD quipped, "A lot of carbon dioxide being expended at CTIA talking about how spectrum is the industry’s oxygen." Just so you know, they HAVE spectrum. They horde spectrum. What they don't do is deploy it until they feel like it.

CTIA wants another auction. The FCC's "Genachowski touts benefits of voluntary incentive auction where broadcasters and others get a piece of the revenue generated by auctioning off their spectrum."  Have they all forgotten that the radio spectrum is a public asset?

The Big T

March 21, 2011

AT&T announced yesterday that they were buying T-Mobile from its parent, DT, for $39B.  There are so many losers in this combination I don't know where to begin!

First, generally consumers lose as Ma Bell hordes even more spectrum. T-Mobile has AWS spectrum; Ma Bell is buying Qualcomm's 700 MHz spectrum, which is being contested by consumer groups, because all this spectrum shouldn't be in the hands of 2 companies.

Business is Change

March 19, 2011

Whenever I read a really good book, it takes a while because my head fills with thoughts of how this will help my clients (and my readers  Right now I am reading Evil Plans by Hugh MacLeod [affil link].


Success is Complex. It isn't simple.

Business is Change.


Talking with a Regional CLEC

March 18, 2011

A Look at B-Lynk

March 18, 2011

Super Charging the SIP Trunk

March 17, 2011

I was on a panel about Supercharging the SIP Trunk Sales by Broadvox. It sounded similar to the panel I did at CVX West 2010 on Upselling the SIP Trunk sale.

This one had to go a little more basic to What is SIP? SIP Trunking is how carriers power dial-tone to an IP-PBX.

Overheard in Vegas

March 16, 2011

Telesphere hired Andy Abramson's PR firm, Communicano.

AireSpring rolled out Meshed MPLS. What's that? It's how you connect the MPLS networks of four carriers to be able to cost effectively deliver MPLS service to anywhere in the US.

The Number from Above(Net)

March 16, 2011

Here is AboveNet CEO Bill LaPerch presenting the business numbers to the channel partners at their private event at the CP Expo in Vegas this week. AboveNet has some interesting numbers:

2400 lit buildings including 450 data centers

1400 customers, most of whom are not wholesale.

NetWolves and AboveNet Combine with Agent

March 16, 2011

From the Netwolves newsletter comes a story about 2 carriers teaming up and helping an Agent make a big sale.

Customer has multiple locations and wants Ethernet Service in all of their sites. They want the carrier to provide fully managed routers and switches and they want it all on a single invoice. What do you do?

Broad Notes on Hosted PBX

March 15, 2011

No One Buys Without Trust

March 11, 2011

In this second podcast with TMC's CEO, Rich Tehrani, we discuss Branding, Thought Leadership and Lead Gen.

When companies market, they expect the phone to ring and sales to be made. If only it were that simple. There are different kinds of Marketing - Advertising, PR, press releases, cause marketing, guerrilla, and more - most of which are designed to be Attention grabbers or Disruptive to the prospect.

What's Up in Cellular Rumors?

March 10, 2011

First, Clearwire's founder and Chairman Craig McGraw resigned in February. Now CEO Bill Marrow has resigned and the rest of the C-Suite has been re-shuffled. (see story here).  Clearwire is in negotiations with Sprint and out looking for capital before it runs out of cash.

Lightsquared is also in talks with Sprint about a partnership on Lightsquares 4G network build. 

Citrix Cash Machine

March 8, 2011

Thoughts on Deploying Cloud

March 7, 2011


In this 13 minute interview with Dale Frohman of The Frohman Group , we discuss Cloud Deployment in the business.

Deployment of Cloud services is much easier in the small business space (under 100 employees), because typically this is not a complex network infrastructure. The first hurdle to Cloud Deployment is the complexity of the network environment.

Some systems just can not be moved to a cloud platform.


VAR's in the Cloud with HyperOffice

March 7, 2011

My EarthLink Strategy

March 4, 2011

When I analyze the four CLEC components of the new EarthLink Business, I wonder what Atlanta will do with it.

Deltacom had a huge fiber network (IFN) that essentially went under-utilized. In my experience, many employees did not know about IFN. Assets like lit buildings, collocations, colo gear, and the fiber maps are crucial to revenue generation from those hard cost assets.

Big Q: How Do I ...

March 2, 2011

So a big question I get from service providers is How Do I Sell Online? This question comes in many forms, such as (1) How Can I Sell This on my Website?; (2) How Can I be like RingCentral?; (3) How do I sell more on the web?; (4) What's that SEO thing?

Let's tackle the SEO thing first. (You can hear Rich Tehrani and I talk about SEO here).  Search engine optimization is about helping your website show up during one of the 31B searches done every month.

Why Do I Have To Give You That Info Again?

March 1, 2011

Speaking with Fonolo CEO Shai Berger and I were talking last night about Call Centers and the lousy customer satisfaction. All the M&A activity creates pockets of technology and data and apps that cannot integrate easily with other pockets of apps, systems, data.

For example, a customer calls an 800 number of a company that bought two companies - and integration is complete. Except it isn't. The company uses a couple of call centers to fulfill customer service.

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