Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

economy

Is it the Regulatory Environment?

February 9, 2010

In a twitter exchange with Erik Cecil, former regulatory counsel at Level3, we were dialoging about the Fairpoint bankruptcy. (FairPoint aims to cut debt by two-thirds).

My reply stated, "Just 2 years after the deal w/VZ to create an unstable Fairpoint despite opposition, Fairpoint screws everyone." By everyone, I mean the customers, the economy, the state, the PUC who approved the deal despite being against it (And Erik, you think there is regulation?), the workers, the Union, shareholders and the debt holders. I actually don't care about the last two, because both should have known it was going to go POOF!

Broadband is Flattening

January 12, 2010

Pike & Fischer survey shows that broadband is flattening. (I wrote a little about this yesterday). This means a couple of things:

One, customer acquisition costs of broadband is going to increase AND margins will shrink, because it also means short term pricing will drop. (Price war coming ...

Stalled Stimulus of Broadband

January 8, 2010

It was July of 2009 when the applications for BTOP and BIB awards were due. It's January 2010 and shovel ready awards have been granted mainly for middle mile projects. Where are the rest of the awards?

We can look at the failure of Muni Wi-Fi (last mentioned when EarthLink's wi-fi network in Phillie was acquired by the city for $2M).

What Matters Now

December 16, 2009

Seth Godin released a free e-book titled What Matters Now. It is a collection of thoughts from many folks. Rich and I didn't get tagged to submit, but I'm following Seth's advice to add my thoughts here.

Seth begins by writing:

It's The Customer Experience Stupid

December 14, 2009

I'm flying today on AA. They will charge your credit card for everything -- even the unfiltered, warm, smelly air if we could - airline. You can speak to a human at the airport gate who will tell you to call the 800 number, who will tell you to do it online. 

This same airline will charge you for snacks (no free peanuts, but $4 for a bad cookie <-- who makes a bad cookie?!) and for checked baggage. And they still lost $359 million - while pissing off their customer base.
 
I watched as they told a passenger he was going to have to check his bag at the gate for $20 because his wheels put it 4 inches outside the box.



A Few Words with COLOTRAQ

December 1, 2009

Dany Bouchedid is not only the President of the Technology Channel Association, the only not-for-profit association for channel partners, but he is the CEO of COLOTRAQ. Colotraq is a sort of master agency for collocation worldwide, that has direct agreements with over 400 facilities globally. I asked Dany a few questions about colocation, since I think it is an area that some agents (channel partners) are mystified about. However, with worker mobility and the significance of always available data (reasons cloud computing, SAAS and virtualization are buzzing), colocation becomes important to businesses.

Were There Highlights in 2009?

November 25, 2009

Ken Camp's Year in Review prompted me to write this. It's been an interesting year. SIP, UC, Cloud, Merger. That's really how I see the blur that was 2009. I attended so many conferences this year.

Telecom Takeover Tuesday

November 4, 2009

Yesterday was a big day for The Channel. Two separate acquisitions occurred with both takeover companies expressing interest in the Channel of the company being bought.

First, we have GTT buying WBS Connect. WBSC is just a reseller of Transit and Transport with about $28M in revenue. It was bought for about $1.8M in cash and notes plus $600K in stock.

Pouring Billions

September 21, 2009

The WSJ has an article titled, "AT&T, Verizon Still Pouring Billions Into Mobile Networks". It notes that cellcos have already spent billions upgrading their networks to 2.5G and 3G -- and now will spend billions more on 4G.

In addition, both companies are also dumping billions into International routes, domestic broadband networks, and their respective triple play networks, U-Verse and FiOS. 

On top of that, both companies have been acquiring companies, like Alltel and Centennial. Ummm, how are they not toppled over in debt? 

These companies have felt intense pricing pressure from cable companies as well as T-Mobile and Sprint. Customer Acquisition and Retention costs have to be high, even as ARPU remains about the same.





People Won't Pay

August 14, 2009

If your model is free, how do you pay the bills? How do you pay for the infrastructure - the servers, switches, collocation, bandwidth, labor, etc.? How do you pay developers and engineers to scale it and keep it up?

Twitter is still free and so is Facebook. Popular too.

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