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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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More Communications Apps

June 27, 2008

BlitzTime takes social networks one step further. One of the downsides to connecting with people on LinkedIn is that you can't easily communicate with them. With BlitzTime you set up a profile, including education, interests, etc., then log in, join an event, or start one of your own - thus able to have a conference call with people you might want to meet.

More Conference calling apps are popping up.

Posted in Web 2.0, apps, social network, video, voip

Tagged: apps, chat, collaboration, conferencing, IM, video, web 2.0 : Related Tags: video, people, sharing

Helio sold to Virgin

June 27, 2008

the last of the MVNO players folds its cards. Helio was sold to Virgin Mobile for $39M - in equity! SK Telecom and EarthLink spent over $275M to build this loser and gain a whopping 170K users. This number is amazing because I thought they were at 300K.

Posted in telco

Tagged: mvno : Related Tags: virgin mobile, telecom earthlink, virgin, telecom, mobile, helio

VZ-NJ vs. TeleTruth

June 27, 2008

Bruce Kushnick has been fighting Verizon in the Northeast for years through is TeleTruth organization. Here is the latest:

Verizon, New Jersey has filed to increase various costs of local phone service. The New Jersey Board of Utilities (BPU) should not accept Verizon's proposal to raise local rates.

Posted in politics, telco

Tagged: rates, verizon, vz : Related Tags: local service, switched telephone, public switched, telephone network, service, local

Double Dip in LA

June 25, 2008

The IT Expo in LA is Sept. 16-18. If you are going (and why wouldn't you?) there is an opportunity for you to stay the weekend and see the Wimbledon of Beach Volleyball as the AVP Pro Beach Volleyball tournament at Manhattan Beach starts that Friday.

Rich points out all the reasons to attend this event. If you are going, give me a shout. If you have any restaurant suggestions close to the host hotel or in Manhattan Beach, please let me know. Thanks!

Posted in expo, off topic

Tagged: expo, volleyball : Related Tags: manhattan beach, beach volleyball, beach

DSL Anti-Trust

June 23, 2008

Supreme Court [finally] To Investigate If AT&T Is Violating Antitrust Laws With Wholesale DSL Pricing

TechDirt writes about the Supreme Court deciding to accept the Appeal of PacWest (now called AT&T) in its anti-trust battle with an ISP named LinkLine.

"A series of lawsuits followed, including an appeals court ruling that found that AT&T was abusing monopoly rights to offer prices that were simply out of line with market pricing -- making it effectively impossible for any other provider to compete. AT&T has appealed and now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.

Posted in broadband, politics, telco

Tagged: antitrust, att, dsl, isp : Related Tags: supreme court, court ruling, appeals court, provider compete, rights offer, court

FISA Compromise Bill

June 23, 2008

Helping David Isenberg spread the word today about the "Under the surveillance "compromise" that the House of Representatives approved today, telecommunications companies that participated in the government's warrantless surveillance program would get immunity from civil lawsuits as long as they showed that they were told that the program was authorized by [the President] and was determined by his legal team to be lawful."

from Dan Froomkin in his Washington Post blog, White House Watch, Friday, June 20, 2008

Posted in CALEA, telco

Tagged: congress, politics, telco, wiretapping : Related Tags:

What Do They Do?

June 23, 2008

What do these folks do? I get PR messages from people. My gripe is that the marketing folks forget to actually say anything that people can understand. Instead they are using the press release for 2 things: SEO if it gets published and proof that they did their job.

Posted in PR

Tagged: fluff, marketing, pr : Related Tags: channel program, datacenter, program, systems, channel, resellers

Wow! FCC Sides Against Verizon

June 23, 2008

In an epic decision today, the FCC sided with cable (Bright House) against Verizon in the battle over CPNI and customers

In this Memorandum Opinion and Order, we reject the Enforcement Bureau's April 11, 2008, Recommended Decision in this Accelerated Docket proceeding, and grant in part a formal complaint filed against Defendants (collectively, "Verizon") pursuant to section 208 of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended ("Act"). For the reasons explained below, we conclude that Verizon is violating section 222(b) of the Act by using, for customer retention marketing purposes, proprietary information (CPNI) of other carriers that it receives in the local number porting process, and we order Verizon immediately to cease and desist from such unlawful conduct.

In other words, when VZ gets an order to port a number to a CLEC or a cable company, they cannot market to that person while delaying the porting process. CPNI has been a huge issue for this Commission lately. I'm shocked that Martin stuck to his CPNI guns, instead of allowing VZ to torpedo MSO customer acquisition efforts.

Posted in FCC, cableco, telco

Tagged: cpni, fcc, lnp, verizon : Related Tags: porting process, verizon, customer, porting, order, process

International Minutes

June 22, 2008

In the latest issue of Capacity magazine, there are a number of articles about the International long distance market. It seems Skype has swiped 14 Billion minutes of international from the carriers. Just so you know how big of a slice that is: TI Sparkle does 17B; TATA does 21B; and IDT and iBasis did 24B each. It didn't take long for Skype to catch the carriers either.

Posted in telco

Tagged: ld : Related Tags: international, minutes, skype

The Billion $ Big Deal

June 20, 2008

Over at isp-bw, we spent an evening discussing XO's future. With Icahn as the owner of 60% of the stock, 90% of the debt, and 6 board seats, he has the company and any minor shareholder over the barrel. R2 is a minority shareholder who warned Icahn via open letter that if XO files Bankruptcy, they would sue him personally for dereliction of fiduciary duty. On paper, XO looks good.

Posted in telco, xo

Tagged: paetec, telco, xo : Related Tags: fiber, assets, paetec, level, icahn

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