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

October 2013

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One Year After Super Storm Sandy: Any Change?

October 31, 2013

As the one year anniversary of Super Storm Sandy that rocked the Greater NY/NJ area last year passes, many articles have been written, but not much has changed.

83% of Organizations Lack a Business Continuity Plan 1 Year After Hurricane Sandy. But then most people (A) don't think it can happen to them; (B) didn't learn from 9/11 and Katrina either (including our government and FEMA); and (C) people generally do not think climate change is real.

from Verizon's twitter.

Where's the Profit?

October 30, 2013

How To Raise Prices

October 30, 2013

Yesterday there was an article in The Atlantic about a global wine shortage. Apparently, we have had smaller grape harvests in the last couple of years. When you consider that wine consumption is up (and so many new winemakers including Dave Matthews and other celebs have entered the market), it isn't surprising. Plus add Climate Change, which has to affect not just grape harvests but all crops globally.

Backing Up Terabytes

October 24, 2013

I get asked often how a data backup will work when it is Terabytes. Even on a 10MB x 10MB pipe, 2 TB of data is going to take some time. It takes 16 hours on USB 2.0 which is about 53MBps throughput.

Green Cloud Technologies will ship you a NAS and secure hard drives.

Another Event

October 24, 2013

It seems that more and more companies are holding events. We have plenty of trade shows, but apparently that wasn't enough. Now master agencies have shows (some have more than one). One PR firm became an event planning company.

Character Above All

October 23, 2013

Thanks to Bright House Networks for the invite to lunch today to listen to former Colts and Bucs coach, Tony Dungy. It was my first time getting to hear him speak. It was an informal talk.

Dungy spent 10 years in Pittsburgh - 2 years as a player (Super Bowl win) and 8 years as an assistant coach under Chuck Knoll.

Will UC Work or Is It a Question of Money?

October 21, 2013

I see this often enough: UC firm nabs funding. In this case, Thinking Phone Networks got $10M in funding to bring the total to $31M. Thinking Phones has been around since 2006. Maybe UC just isn't going to work.

Broadsoft is Now a SP

October 17, 2013

Broadsoft Connections 2013 kicked off with the CEO keynote. The twitter stream for #BSFTconnections has been interesting. UC-One is the answer to BYOD and mobile. Telstra has been a customer for 10 years - with 250K seats.

Broadsoft Alum Acquired by Fidelity

October 17, 2013

Now that it is out there I can report that cloud-based video conferencing service, Vidtel, was acquired by Fidelity. Wainhouse, a research house for the telepresence industry, let the news out yesterday.

Vidtel, based in Sunnyvale, CA., was founded by former Broadsoft CMO, Scott Wharton, in 2008. Alex Doyle, another Broadsoft alum, was Vidtel's VP of Marketing.

Roundup: TDS, Zayo, Birch and the Business Markets

October 15, 2013

Zayo scooped up some more fiber - dark fiber this time. Zayo adds 1,200 route miles of dark fiber that hits Chicago,Des Moines, Omaha and Denver in its acquisition of Fiberlink LLC. No financial details were available from privately held Zayo.

Birch closed on its Lightyear Networks deal, since Lightyear settled its USF contribution dispute with the FCC - even during a shutdown.

Why Network Matters

October 15, 2013

High speed broadband, DSL, cable modems, Gigabit, fiber to the home, metro Ethernet, DS3 and T1, even LTG and 4G are just network transport. Yet that is all the advertising is about, right? Why?

Because the most important thing today is access to the network.

Why Agents Should Be Pro-Copper

October 11, 2013

The IIA is the perfect example of an astroturf trade group funded by and for the ILECs. The IIA put together a study to show that copper maintenance is eating up funds that could be used to deploy fiber-based broadband networks.

Fact: Windstream has penetrated 71 percent of its access lines with broadband and is making revenue from copper based broadband. In rural America, copper based broadband is still gold. Ask Fairpoint, Frontier, HT, C-Link or any rural LEC about how much revenue they make from copper in the form of POTS, T1, EoC, PRI, DSL and DS3.

Savvis and Verizon Go Head to Head

October 10, 2013

I read a headline today that Amazon took a CIA contract away from IBM. Hmmm. IBM, Amazon, Verizon, Savvis, AT&T and others are all fighting for the same contracts.

Meanwhile Savvis is rolling out new integrated solutions to go head-to-head against IBM and Verizon. I can't tell the specifics from the press release because it is filled with keywords and buzz terms that mean nothing.

Vocalocity Acquired by Vonage

October 10, 2013

Rich Tehrani has a good analysis of Vonage finally getting in the B2B space by acquiring Vocalocity. Vonage is acquiring Vocalocity for "$130 million, including $105 million in cash and $25 million in Vonage common stock."

It is interesting to note that Vocalocity was on schedule to hit $56 million in annual revenue this year. That makes this buy 2.3x revenue.

The Value of UC

October 8, 2013

Dan Caruso, CEO of Zayo, wrote a post about the profitability of bandwidth. I got to thinking about how it applied to VoIP, specifically UC, Hosted UC, UCaaS, Cloud Comms or whatever silly marketing hashtag we are using this month.

Just the fact that the term has to change so often means that the industry is searching for identity.

It also means that there is a lot of education needed to sell Unified Communications to its full benefit.

Channel Sales Enablement Part 5

October 8, 2013

I have an interest in Growth Hacking, making a company grow by acquiring users, customers or revenue. The problem I usually face is that in channel sales, the number of agents is not a viable metric.

The Channel looks at it as the more feet on the street we have, the better sales will be. NO!

TWC Surprises Everyone by Buying DukeNet

October 7, 2013

TW Cable surprised everyone by buying DukeNet for $600 million in cash to gain access to the 8,700 mile fiber network which will help TWC hit more businesses.

All cablecos realize that growth will come from the business market. The consumer side - long the hallmark of cable - is declining. Cord cutting has reached 9% of households.

FCC Telemarketing Rules Change

October 7, 2013

Bloomberg has an article making it sound like US businesses are paying through the nose for violating the Do Not Call list.

The FCC has added rules to make it harder to call people on the DNC list. Why is that a problem?

"(1) the requirement that prior to placing calls businesses obtain written -- not oral -- consent, and (2) the elimination of the "established business relationship" defense for certain calls to residential phone lines."

The FTTH Expo in Tampa

October 5, 2013

RingCentral IPO and Other Activity

October 2, 2013

The US dollar isn't worth what it used to be. Twitter has an IPO filed that estimates the value at almost $13B. Twitter is still growing and on target for $1B in revenue but is losing about $110-$150 million per year. Co-founders Evan Stone and Noah Glass do not own any stock in the company.

No More TDM

October 2, 2013

In an effort to speed up the adoption of IP-based voice services (like SIP trunks and VoIP), AT&T has stopped compensating Agents for TDM. No more POTS lines or PRI's, folks.

It's funny that this happens now because I have been trying to get an order in for 3 weeks for a PRI in rural Texas. It only took 3 weeks for SBC's division of AT&T to say, "We can't port those numbers.

Big Data is Big Smoke

October 1, 2013

Over 10 years ago, a grocery chain in the Northeast, Stop & Shop, launched the customer loyalty or savings card. You know that card you need to swipe to get the advertised savings. After a couple of years they pulled the card for three reasons: one, the customers weren't happy with it; two, state law required the store to give everyone the savings anyway (if they asked for it); and three, they weren't getting a return on the data.

We didn't have Big data back then.

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