Recently in bellsouth agent Category

I've been trying to order Dry Fiber out of the AT&T Southeast FCC Tariff # 1 for over a month.

The Service Inquiry used to be manual paper - now it is a system called NSS. No idea how to access that system. 

I tried to order it through the Channel. It is not on the commission schedule so my Channel Manager wrote me, "We need to concentrate on products we get paid for, dry fiber is not one of those products."  So nevermind helping the customer.  Or sell product and bring in some revenue. Or that the customer has a huge spend with AT&T already. (Or that I just need an SI done - nothing more).

Product Management indicated that AT&T is no longer offering the Dry Fiber product. "The product was removed once the merger between AT&T & Bellsouth took place." But that is erroneous as the following filings will prove.

BellSouth filed to discontinue Dry Fiber service in July 2007 (see letter PDF here). Then AT&T filed with the FCC to withdraw its Section 63.71 application seeking to discontinue its provision of Dry Fiber service in Jan. 2008 (see letter PDF here). It currently is written into the FCC Tariff # 1 as 4-strand fiber transport (see PDF Tariff here).

Next it's over to the CLEC side of the house where the Wholesale account rep says that she only handles UNE. The other Wholesale rep handles FCC tariff items, but not a word out of her yet. 

My big problem is that this service is listed in the tariff. It shouldn't be that hard to order service. 

Next step for the client is a phone call. Either to call a telecom attorney (either Kris Twomey or Jonathan Marashlian); or to call the FCC Wireline Competition Bureau (202) 418-1500.

A client who ordered a 2xT1 MIS in March wants a stand alone Internet T1 at the same location to segment some traffic. Trying to pull a simple contract for this customer is a bear. Why?

DUNS number given to me by the carrier in March. Not found. Please request a DUNS number. HUH?

Nothing can be input without a DUNS. No where to just pull a contract. Why does it have to be so difficult? Why do agents have to spend hours in your systems to sell a sub-$500 standard service? Why do we have to take hours of training on these systems?

My first reaction is because RBOCs don't want agents. They keep cutting commissions and adding more requirements. Making it more difficult to make a living as an agent for them.

It is simply easier at this point to just sell resellers - Acces2Go or NIT or WBS. It's residual based commission. It's roughly the same rate. And it's so much simpler. 

This from Telephony online and the Convergence Consulting Group:

The latest in an annual study of the bundled services market shows US telecom service providers are losing wireline voice customers at a faster pace and being transformed in the process into companies that will look very different from their traditional telecom roots. The Battle for the American Couch Potato: Bundling, TV, Internet, Telephone, Wireless, released this week by the Convergence Consulting Group, shows maintaining a broadband connection is increasingly important to telecom providers, as wireline voice services become much less important.

If you look at the numbers in that PDF report and you still think that the QBPP is a viable option or that the last 400K businesses in the BellSouth region will somehow see the light and convert, I have some land for you in South Florida.

I have written about this in years past: the telcos have finally hit the wall. Everything is flat or down now: TV, wireline, cellular, and broadband. Granted most numbers are for residential, not business accounts which agents sell, but this will affect the entire telco business. Telco moved from the most profitable service - Voice - to Internet (the 2nd most profitable) - into TV, which is te least profitable. Why? Set-top boxes cost $400 per pop. How do you recoup that $5 per month rental? Most of the pricing goes straight to the content. You know, Disney and ESPN want their dough. Then there's the network upgrade for TV (and high-speed internet), which although VZT says is under $900 per home passed, the numbers I see are closer to $2000. Let's factor in the advertising. I get something almost everyday from VZ. At even $0.75 per mailer that's $15 per month. Times how many homes passed?  See how that may slow the telco engine? Plus MSO's moved from the least profitable service (TV) to the most profitable (Voice). And MSO's are getting into mobile data and maybe cellular voice with Sprint.

When you look at the summary from Convergence Consulting Group, it looks bleak.

• We estimate Cable's double play base of TV and Internet subscribers YE2008 at 61% (we forecast 79% YE2011). The RBOC/Telcos residential telephone to broadband overlap was 33% at YE2008 (we forecast 54% YE2011). Hence, it's easier for Cable to add voice customers off this overlap than for the RBOC/Telcos to add TV customers.
• 2008 RBOC/Telcos residential wireline telephone line loss was 10%.
• Wireless Substitution was responsible for about half the loss and Cable for the other half.
• We forecast Cable will have 23% of residential telephone subscribers by YE2009.
• We estimate wireless-only households at 20% at YE2008.
• Wireless annual subscriber additions continue to slow, 2008 saw 15.6M (2007 saw 22.4M) and we forecast 13.9M in 2009.
• Data continues to drive wireless ARPU growth (voice ARPU is declining). We forecast that price competition, which intensified in 2008, will continue to increase going forward.

Telcos are building out high-speed networks for TV and Internet, which is costing a bundle, at the same time that they are forklift upgrading the cellular networks to 4G. Have they even paid off the debt from constructing the 2.5G and 3G systems? Meanwhile, Charter is bankrupt and the rest of the MSO's have to upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 while also constructing WiMAX networks. All while the ARPU is decreasing and the customer acquisition costs are increasing.

With these kinds of pressures on the RBOCs, imagine the pressure on the ILECs without a cellular division like QWEST, Embarq, Windstream, Frontier and Fairpoint. Landline losses that cannot be off-set by TV or cellular revenues. Yikes! Basically, the EarthLink strategy right? Cost cutting as the primary executive decision. Right out the knitting until its over.

Where do you think Agents come into that play? With losses, an easy cost cutting measure is to stop paying agent commissions. Think about your Channel Partners in 2009.

At the Channel Partners Expo, on individual calls with agents, and on a conference call with a bunch of agents today, I noticed something big: the Channel is shifting.

I have known for a while that VAR's would replace the traditional telecom dialing-for-dollars, save-you-10% agents. It's coming because sales cycles are longer; the product set is very different; and it's all about IP and Apps. (Net-head versus Bell-head).

There's another shift happening: agents are banding together every way they can to get leverage against the carriers, who hold too much power. It started bubbling  in 2007 with my post called What's a Partner Worth? In the 2 years since that post, there hasn't been much change on the carrier side.

Agents first started bonding together as Master Agents. Then came the experiment called the Agent Alliance - a group of master agents banding together for group buying. I guess its a master master agency. None of those entities speaks for the agents.

"There is a serious disconnect between many agents and their suppliers on the expectations they have for each other in developing a mutually beneficial partnership," says PHONE+ Editor Khali Henderson. "Some of this may be a failure to recognize the changing dynamics in the telecom industry and their impacts on the participants in the value chain. Starting a formal dialog in the industry may help to overcome these gaps in understanding."

The dialog today starts when commissions aren't paid. You look at the situation for agents with MCI when Verizon bought them and changed the MCI Agent contract. Over 100 agents got screwed out of commission because the new contract was unfavorable or untenable. It happened with Cable & Wireless. Many mergers have had similar results for agents. 

I will have to say that most of these issues are contract related. The quotas and other issues are spelled out in the contract - IF you read and understand the fine print. If you use a Master Agent, you don't even get to see the fine print, because this Industry loves the NDA (non-disclosure agreement). It's why agents can't get a fair shake - they have no idea what is availble to negotiate. Cisco just lost in court with the judge declaring that Cisco's partner agreement was unconscionable, meaning that the contract is too one-sided. I think that if that precendent stands, agents will have a leg up.

I've been on the receiving end of a carrier (BellSouth) taking away a boatload of hard earned commissions, so I understand the frustration. (After 5 years, therapy, anger management classes, blogging and drinking, I can almost move past it). But at the end of the day, what band of agents has $1M to hire an attorney to fight a carrier over a contract dispute? That's what it would take. About $1M and a long time (7 years). What do you do in the mean time?

Not to be mean, but the industry is almost tipping over with bad debt, rising costs of goods, lower margins, and, let's face it, failing strategies. By that I mean, how many carriers have a solid long-term strategy?

[I deleted my FiOS is a losing strategy rant here]

Let's just say that I look at many CLEC's who are so obviously selling underwater that I want to take a SCUBA test. And it isn't just the Channel - the direct side is drowning in there too. In fact, the direct side is usually the one that starts the price war against the agent side. And where are the policies and guidelines in place for that Not to Occur?

Some carriers (like the ones on Moody's Death Watch list) may not be around in a year, so agents need to watch that to.  Agents need to be aware of how inter-connected the whole CLEC and Reseller market is. Reseller A buys from Carrier V and Reseller B and D, who buys from Carrier Q and Reseller A and D. When one collapses (like Alphared did recently), it cripples the rest. And there isn't enough margin - room - for that kind of error.

At the end of the day, the agents need to band together - to do more than swap tales of woe and vent - and that's why a bunch of us have put in many hours in the last year to create the Technology Channel Association. Join now! It's free through the end of March for agents and we offer group health insurance for our members.

Telecom is broken. I can't remember the last time an order went smooth. Well, wait, I can actually, it was a BellSouth Metro E. The REUC order center for BellSouth FCC circuits really knows how to work an order. For 10 years that group in Sunrise FL has been outstanding to work with. (The former DSG and the MEOC had some great people who made my life easy too. Those grooups are gone now).

This week just trying to get quotes has been a struggle, but the topper on the cake has been an Internet T1 install. It was delayed for weeks due to address mismatch -- not the street address, the suite number. (The customer was moving into a bigger office space in the same building). Eventually, I just submitted without a suite number.  On install, client was told that the tech would come back. Waited two days, no tech - then told by provisioning that no tech was coming. We finally get to the turn up and I walk the customer through the install on the phone (twice actually, two different people). We get through turn up.

The managed router did not have NAT or DHCP turned on. One day  just for that. No phone number for router configurations. You have to order changes by email!!! And only from the 2 email addresses on the order form. WTH?

Then we add the IP Phones, but we need to modify two lines of the config. We are waiting again.  This is too convoluted for me. The ROI is negative. The turn up alone was 20 hours of time. 

Can anyone guess what carrier this is?

It looks like AT&T is heading for a strike. Most people at AT&T I know have already been cross trained (I use that term loosely) to handle union jobs. A wholesale account manager will be heading to Michigan to be a T1 installer. Nice. Glad I don't have any AT&T orders in the system.

Also, it looks like AT&T is keeping its sales meetings quiet. (No logos. No banners.) I guess they are afraid that if the union or press get wind of the mega-bucks parties that they threw in Dallas in January and next month in Miami, that there might be trouble. The 94 Solution Providers that won Champion awards are set to meet at the Diplomat in April.

There has been much discussion about ethics in the channel. How ethical is it for carrier channel managers to poach agents and deals away from master agencies to move them to "preferred" Champions? This has been going on for some time. It doesn't say much about the Integrity of people in the Channel. And if you are a Master Agent who benefits from poaching, it comes around. The only thing anyone at Bell is loyal to is there own pocketbook. When you start slipping -- and they all do -- you will be thrown by the wayside and picked apart -- to help build up the next "preferred" partner.

In its latest financial filing AT&T claims that they sold 6.9M iPhones and added 1M new cellular customers in the quarter due to the iPhone 3G. (Apple says that 39% of quarterly revenues were due to pushing out 200M iPhones so far.)  Here's the funny part: Agents can't sell the iPhone. Agents can sell Blackberries and other phones but not the iPhone.

Once again AT&T spends money to create a "Solution Provider" Alliance Channel that demonstrates preferences to AT&T sales employees over its Channel agents. On its Alliance website, AT&T writes "Targeted customer sets to minimize channel conflicts" That's some messaging there.

Speaking to the Channel Champions, more than one is worried about what the new year will bring. One never knows what the RBOC Channel will look like year to year.

Not being able to sell the hottest phone to business execs is just one example of how the direct side is treated preferentially over the Indirect Channel. Another is on pricing. Last week, I received a phone call from AT&T about my posting pricing to my client blog. They wanted it removed immediately. Well, I am a sub-agent of a Solutions Provider; I am not direct. (Been there done that; have the scars to prove it). But the pricing did not come from an AT&T website. The pricing came from one of my customers who got it from his account exec. At that point, it's public domain. Just another example of AT&T and its control issues.

AT&T is a wireless company. If that was really true, agents would be able to sell all of its wireless products.

Jon Arnold makes a point: "Voice is a double-edged sword for service providers - most of their businesses are built around it, but with the advent of VoIP, it's become a commodity, and in many cases, a race to zero."

One point I make is that voice is just one app that we sell. Voice and email together are the key killer apps. But why isn't VoIP making more inroads?

I talk to many VoIP Providers and few are anywhere near where they want their numbers to be. And they are in a quandary to figure out how to increase sales. 

One reason is that their isn't really a problem to fix for some people. Landlines are declining for consumers as people switch to cellular only, but not many businesses have gone all cellular. (Plus you still need to fax -- and VoIP has not solved that issue for the most part).

Cable is making progress based on selling bundles to consumers. We will soon see how they do selling digital phone service to small business. Notice that MSO's do not mention VoIP?

I think the other reason is that it isn't a transactional sale. To sell Hosted PBX is a long sales cycle. Selling SIP trunking is easier (as a PRI replacement), but it is declining ARPU. To an agent that means less commission. To the carrier, it is less revenue (or new revenue).  So what agent set wants to spend the 7 contacts to sell 7 handsets and Hosted PBX to a small business for less than $400 in billing to see $40 per month?  

When you are basically offering landline replacement, it is easier for the agents to sell landlines (and get paid more).

Jon Arnold also mentions that some VoIP Providers are morphing - like Jajah and Mobivox - to incorporate VoIP into a tool.  Another example would be FreedomVoice with their Newber app.

The problem will still be transitioning the sales force (read channel agents) from a transactional model to a Trusted Advisor or Solution Selling model. To do that, agents would need to make points on the hardware and the install as well as the monthly billing. The Channel isn't ready, but some companies - like Level3, XO, and Adtran - are working on it. (And so will the TCA in 2009).

I hate seeing this guy. And I get it all the time in the ordering system at one of the ILEC's. "Sorry you spent 30 minutes inputting all that data that I won't save. Bye now. ... Oh, and start over!"

And this company is an ASP?! I wouldn't even let it host my clients apps, let alone manage/run them.