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10 Lessons from Volleyball, Part 2

By Peter on Thursday, May 23

Part 1 of the 10 Business Lessons from Volleyball can be found here. In volleyball, the only play you control yourself is...

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Tagged sales, strategy, volleyball

CloudTC and N-Able Acquired

By Peter on Wednesday, May 22

"Australian-owned IP PBX systems company, Vixtel, has completed the acquisition of Silicon Valley based glass phone developer, CloudTC, for an undisclosed figure,"...

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Tagged hosted pbx, itexpo, mergers, phone system, RMM

ProfitBricks: Where InfiniBand Meets Cloud 2.0

By Rich Tehrani on Wednesday, May 22

In a recent meeting with William Toll and Pete Johnson of ProfitBricks, the pair were ecstatic to explain how their company has...

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Tagged amazon, cloud computing, data center, ec2, infiniband, interop, profitbricks, public cloud, technology

Proactive Care Puts Operators One Step Ahead

By Peter Bernstein on Monday, May 20

By Thomas Fuerst, Senior Director, Multimedia Solutions MarketingAlcatel-Lucent

Monitoring and analyzing network data proactively saves operators time, money, and customers.

When a network service fails, it makes headlines, ticks off customers, and costs that network operator money. When a failure is headed off in advance, on the other hand, there might not be praise-laden headlines, but it's newsworthy nonetheless.

The traditional approach to customer care has typically been: a disgruntled customer calls customer service and complains of a service interruption or problem; the rep, learning of it for the first time, sends out a technician the next day, and eventually finds a resolution. Often, customers are left feeling put out, and the operator has spent significant time and money resolving the problem. Even worse is the customer who doesn’t call and just feels this is ‘typical’ of their network experience. That is a customer at risk of leaving.

Proactive care flips this dynamic on its head by using predictive analytics to identify potential outages or errors in the network and stop them before they occur. It consists of three main parts: one, constantly monitoring and measuring data on the network; two, real-time analysis of the data; and three, the most important, acting on that analysis to fix the problem.

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Tagged Alcatel-Lucent, big data, customer care, KPIs, network monitoring, procativecare | Responses

10 Lessons from Volleyball

By Peter on Monday, May 20

I've played volleyball for over 25 years. I have traveled around the US to watch the pros live - both indoor...

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Tagged hiring, strategy, volleyball

Emerging Threats Combats a Million Plus Pieces of New Malware a Week

By Rich Tehrani on Friday, May 17

There are 250,000 plus new pieces of malware being produced each day equating to one piece per person in the US in...

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Tagged emerging threats, interop, malware, security

NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability

By Rich Tehrani on Friday, May 17

One of the goals of ETSI NFV is to allow new entrants to provide solutions to carriers based on software instead of...

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Tagged bss, carrier, ericsson, huawei, interoperability, nfv, nokia siemens networks, nsn, oss, sdn, software telco

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Merger Rumors Abound

April 7, 2009

Well, it is conference month with the industry gathering at CTIA and VoiceCon (and other shows). And when we get together we tend to gossip. The latest rumors (some thanks to Telecom Ramblings) involve XO, TWTC, and Qwest.

Apparently, Qwest longhaul business - the original Qwest - is for sale, but who has that kind of money to buy it?

Posted in mergers, telecommunications

Tagged: level3, mergers, qwest, twtelecom, xo : Related Tags: level, qwest

Duopoly against the City

April 6, 2009

CircleID has the story of ILECs and Cable companies once again fighting municipalities, like BellSouth and Cox fought LUS.

With President Obama determined to promote the development of open network telecommunications and smart grid networks we can expect the incumbents to step up their legal battles to stop this from happening.

In relation to the recent $7 billion stimulus package AT&T made a statement that it didn't need the money, but that it would launch a defensive campaign against any competitors using the money to encroach on its territory.

To me, it's anti-American for the Duopoly to fight the city. It's more taxpayer money that could be used for something useful that gets used to fight against two enemies of progress and innovation.

Posted in broadband, cableco, duopoly, economy, fiber, politics, telco, telecommunications

Tagged: broadband, duopoly, fiber, muni : Related Tags: duopoly, fight, money

Telecom is Broken Part III

April 6, 2009

So a client calls me. An agent sent him an unsolicited quote for 10MB of bandwidth over Ethernet for a ridiculously low quote. Since I have a long history with the client, he offered me the chance to match it and take the order.

So I go back to the carrier and ask for a match. I'm told no.

Posted in agents, bandwidth, channel, telco

Tagged: agents, telecom is broken : Related Tags: competitive quote, quote, agent, client

UGC for AT&T

April 5, 2009

AT&T has a strange website up called AT&T Investing in America. Adweek has an article about the campaign around the website.
The website invites Americans to share their inspiring stories. "As a member of corporate America, we share in the responsibility to help America through today's economic challenges by investing in areas -- such as AT&T's broadband infrastructure, clean energy, and our communities -- that will again promote economic growth and prosperity," said AT&T rep Jenny Bridges.

Posted in Marketing, economy

Tagged: at&t, economy : Related Tags: website, america

VoiceCon

April 2, 2009

I spent a couple of hours at VoiceCon in the exhibit hall yesterday. The biggest surprise was VZB and Sprint. Especially Sprint. They are pimping the Wireline / Fiber with mobile integration. They had lots of new handsets. (So again they can't even have a whole booth about the wireline product).

Here's a tweet from FierceVoIP: "Sprint tightens bonds with cable; offering enhanced VoIP services to basic VoIP offerings - Cable needs Sprint = Sprint needs Cable."

Posted in cellular, fiber, telco

Tagged: mobility, mpls, nextel, sprint, wireline : Related Tags: sprint, cable

Sign of the Times

March 31, 2009

When Sprint chose Dan Hesse to be CEO in 2007, I was against it. He was a Bell-head who had huge opportunity at Embarq that he wasted. What do I mean? Sprint announced its intention to spin-off its wireline business into a separate company at the end of 2005.

Posted in cellular, economy, telco

Tagged: financials, nextel, sprint : Related Tags: fiber network, sprint, hesse, months, embarq, company

Will the Dial-Up Trend Affect VoIP?

March 31, 2009

Ars technica doesn't believe the articles in CNET and AOL-Tech about people switching back to dial-up. Well, info from dial-up aggregators indicate that dial-up is on the uptick. As some angry comments mention not everyone needs broadband.

Last year we saw the plateau of broadband subscriber numbers.

Posted in broadband, economy, saas, voip

Tagged: dial-up, internet, voip : Related Tags: broadband, affect

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Strickling to Head NTIA

March 30, 2009

The Obama Administration has nominated Larry Strickling to head the NTIA. Right now former Sprint exec, Anna Gomez, is running that department as it gets ready to disperse $4.7B in broadband stimulus money. We don't have a set plan or any procedures in place yet, but picking Larry Strickling should help. Or will it?

Granted picking someone from Sprint probably was a great choice either.

Posted in FCC, politics

Tagged: broadband, FCC, isp, NTIA, RUS, stimulus : Related Tags: broadband stimulus, least employees, deploy broadband, larry strickling, broadband deployment, broadband

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