Recently in CLEC Category

All the talk about Hosted VoIP being on the rise, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, Paetec is on LinkedIn "hiring PBX (Telephone Equipment) Sales Reps for our Raleigh, Nashville, Memphis Offices." For the Allworx product line, I would imagine.

KeaneTel, a Master Agency, is advertising Training on ShoreTel IP PBX Sales. "This is the first of four Training Webinars on ShoreTel by KeaneTel."

All the talk about Hosted PBX and yet premise based PBX sales still seem to be doing alright.

Could be all the FUD. Could be the weekly outages. (Yesterday, it was reported on listservs that Level3 and Cogent had an outage. Level3's outage in Atlanta seemed to even affect VoIP.)

Outages seem to get a lot more press today, but if people are in The Cloud for apps, email, VoIP, data, etc. AND the Internet Access is down, well, you have to consider that. Redundant links - for everyone including the user.

Jerry James, CEO of COMPTEL, updated the CLEC's and ISP's at FISPA about the major issues on the Hill and at the FCC. Besides, the National broadband Policy that is due by February 2010, the FCC has to make major decisions on the following issues: USF Reform, Forbearance petitions galore (Qwest in Phoenix, Verizon on the East Coast, AT&T wherever they can get it), Inter-Carrier Compensation, and Net Neutrality.  Worrisome for CLEC's to say the least. There's also a bill about criminalizing Caller ID Spoofing. Ouch!

Later this week I will be in Atlanta for a FISPA meeting. One of the sessions I am presenting is Social Media in a Nutshell. This follows my Marketing in a Nutshell session.

The slides are here for your pleasure.

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.

I've been talking about Scale and Culture a lot lately. As companies hit revenue plateaus, the growth is difficult.

How do you hire the right employees that will fit in your corporate culture? Especially if your culture is what is one of your differentiators like Paetec likes to say (or Zappos). 

How do you manage the growth?

We have had a $1B CLEC before - Intermedia. It imploded under its own weight. Lousy integration of the companies it bought. Does that remind you of anyone?

The piled on debt was the ultimate killer. Intermedia had a lot of short term debt. It also had back-office issues that prevented installations and created billing errors. Scale kicked its ass.

By all accounts TW Telecom has successfully integrated Xspedius onto a single BSS/OSS system. It's all one now. If only AT&T or VZT/VZB could say the same thing. (I don't even think they care about it).  Does anyone know if Paetec has integrated Allworx, USLEC and McLeod onto one platform?

How do companies that hit $50M get to $100M? Or companies at $5MB hit $10M? The bigger question is can a $1B still grow? TWT and Paetec are at $1B. XO too. Can they grow beyond that? Can they keep monthly churn under 1.4%? Can they raise ARPU? Increase margin? Use scale to their advantage to cut costs? 

I think the he-who-gets-you-here-can't-get-you-there comes into play. Al-Lu and Nortel certainly saw some of that. GM too. 

I look at the XO, AT&T and VZ catalogs and think: WTH? Why is it so wide, so vast, so full of stuff that they will never do well?  Why not have a small catalog of stuff that you will deliver with excellence? That was GE's lesson under Jack Welch. If you can't be Number 1 or 2, sell it or close it.  

Everyone wants growth, until the scale part defeats you.

Talking with a mutual fund manager today about CLEC Strategy. The interesting point that was made is that if you don't own your own facilities is your business model short term?

Interestingly, if you own your own facilities - whether that is fiber, MTU, or wireless - then you certainly have an advantage. To get there, you need to sell Dense. Then convert to facilities from rented plant. This was the idea behind UNE-P, which th eCLEC's failed to follow through on.

They are even doing agin now by selling to anyone regardless of location. The overall strategy has to be to sell UNE-L then move to your own plant as soon as you can. Special Access services are expensive and eat up CLEC margin, even at 40% margin the difference between UNE-L costs and Special Access won't work.

The other key is your sales team. Most CLEC's and other companies competing with the ILEC's have traditional sold on price. Order taking. Now that the ILEC's are de-regulated they can price out at or below CLEC rates. Uh oh! What's a sales drone (order taker) to do?

Now we have to solution sell. Agents have been doing that but even agents have an issue learning IP, Storage, eCommerce, Managed Services, Desktop services, Cloud Computing, SAAS, etc.  It's too much. 

The CLEC with the best trained sales team - and the best services portfolio - will win.

 Grande Communications, a Texas-based communications company providing residential and business customers with high-speed Internet, local and long-distance telephone and digital cable services, is being acquired according to a rumor. I don't have any details other than that.

Tech Data's Senior Product Sales Champion for UC was at the event last night. I spent a few minutes chatting with him about his position, but couldn't really get a definition of UC out of him. Polycom and tele-presence are what he pushes - to me that's not really UC. HD Voice? No we leave that up to Polycom and the vendors. Seems even a tech company has a problem wrapping the head around Unified Communications. (UC doesn't mean the latest gadgets).

XO has some components to build a UC bundle - overlay IVR, Broadsoft SIP Trunking, some straight forward Hosted PBX (with a limited feature set), and Hosted Exchange for the email integration piece.

If the UC Champion thinks UC is tele-presence and video conferencing, what does that say about well defined the term is in the Industry?

I received an invite yesterday from XO to come down to the Tech Data Expo at the Don Cesar Hotel in St. Petersburg FL. ADTRAN shared the booth with XO at this event. Surprisedly, the other two carriers that distribute through Tech Data had assigned booth space, but were absent. 

XO is a good fit for Tech Data. While I think the XO catalog is too large to know well - wireless, hosting, IP, VOIP, transport, collocation and more - the VAR's at Tech Data vary so much in what they do and what would complement their business that the wide selection helps - IF you can get in front of them and remind them throughout the year how they can take advantage of the additional revenue stream. 

For many VAR's the advantage of XO through Tech Data is that there's no contract (especially for those VAR's already under contract with Ma or Pa Bell) and with Tech Data as the "master agency", it isn't likely you need to worry about your residual check.  (And now that XO has converted their debt, it is in a good position going forward, which other debt laden CLEC's can't say).

Many VAR's are already in the PBX space and were asking about SIP. I wasn't sure if they actually grasp the concept of SIP or that they just know enough to be dangerous. The biggest difference between a PRI and a SIP Trunk is Inter-Operability. PRI is a standard with two available configurations that work with almost all the PBX's on the market. SIP Trunk is a spec - a collection of a lot of RFC's that have to work together just right to provide dial-tone. Broadsoft, the softswitch that XO is using, has tested inter-operability on many IP-PBX systems. Not so for other SIP Trunk vendors. So before you sell that SIP Trunk make certain that the IP-PBX model will inter-op with your SIP trunking vendor. It's a mess if it won't work.

From an FCC Filing by Birch:

On May 11, 2009, Birch Communications, Inc. (f/k/a Access Integrated Networks, Inc.), Birch Telecom, Inc. (BTI), and BTI's certificated subsidiaries, and Cleartel Communications, Inc. and its subsidiaries, Cleartel Telecommunications, Inc., IDS Telcom Corp., nii communications, ltd., Now Communications, Inc., Supra Telecommunications and Information Systems, Inc., and Telecon Communications Corporation, filed an application pursuant to section 63.03 of the Commission's rules seeking approval to complete a proposed transaction whereby Assignees will acquire substantially all of the customers, customer accounts, and telecommunications assets of Assignors.

The interesting part is this statement: "BTI is a Delaware corporation, and together with its subsidiaries, is wholly-owned by BCI, a Georgia corporation. .. The following U.S. citizens hold a 10 percent or greater direct interest in BCI: Holcombe Green (66 percent) and and R. Kirby Godsey (32 percent)." Two people collectively own pretty much half of all the UNE-P CLEC's in the Southeast.