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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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Time is Fluid

August 6, 2012

Good article about the six time management tips for entrepreneurs.

Time is fluid. Salvador Dali has an awesome painting called The Persistence of Memory hanging at the Museum of Modern Art that reminds me that time waits for no one and that I have only 52 weekends per year. What am I doing with them?

Tagged: time management : Related Tags:

Snarky News Bits

August 6, 2012

Just so many things to comment on in telecom, but just do not have the time to hit each one. So here are some snarky news bits.

The VZW-SpectrumCo deal in for "tough remedy", Reuters is reporting. Yeah, conditions that will never be enforced.

Posted in bandwidth, broadband, cableco, mergers, spectrum, wireless

Tagged: antitrust, bandwidth, comcast, FCC, metering, news, spectrum, vzw : Related Tags: comcast, spectrum

It Isn't Easy Being an Agent

July 31, 2012

Tonight at a networking event I met a former VZ employee - a channel manager for the last 5 years. He told me he was going to be an Agent to put his telecom knowledge to work to fund his life's endeavors. He kept going on about dabbling in the agent thing part-time. Picking up a project here or there.

Posted in agents, channel, commissions

Tagged: agents, channel managers, channel partners, commissions : Related Tags: being agent, channel manager, agent, channel, being, going

8.5 Things the Olympics Taught Me About Sales

July 31, 2012

Do you want to be a world class sales professional? I do.

Do you want to win gold? I like ink and checks.

Here's how to be like an Olympian.

Posted in sales and selling, training

Tagged: sales, sellecom, selling, training : Related Tags: sales professional, sales, practice, number, professional, coaches

Verbal One Year Contracts

July 31, 2012

ATT has verbal one year contracts available. New service ordered within a few minutes for clients via an Authorized Solution Provider (agent). [This has to be for really simple stuff like POTS and DSL.]

However, ATT doesn't send any TAC (terms) or even welcome information to the customer. There is also a failure to mention that the verbal contracts auto-renew for 2 additional one year terms; thus, it's really a 3 year agreement!

Posted in agents, bellsouth agent, telco

Tagged: agent, att, customer service, ilec : Related Tags: verbal contracts, contracts, verbal, letter, renewal

Comcast Hits 300MB

July 25, 2012

Comcast rolled out Xfinity Platinum service with speeds of 305Mbps down and 65Mbps up for about $295. It was designed to compete with VZ Quantum FiOS, which is 300Mbps down, 65Mbps up, and $205 per month in the Northeast. Xfinity Platinum will include free Xfinity Signature Support (27/4 tech support and a personal consultant), a secure wireless gateway, and the Constant Guard Security Suite.

In some areas Comcast is doubling the speed for its existing tiers.

Posted in Internet, agents, bandwidth, broadband, cableco, channel, mpls

Tagged: agents, broadband, cable, channel partners, comcast, internet, price war : Related Tags: xfinity platinum, comcast, xfinity

Why We Don't Have Customer Service

July 24, 2012

Bank analyst Dick Bove adds, "What my Wells Fargo experience suggests is that a successful bank is one that keeps seeking new customers and selling them more products and not getting bogged down by offering service. Second, it may be that the management of the available funds to reduce possible loss is far more critical than spending a great deal of money on service."

Posted in Marketing

Tagged: banks, customer service : Related Tags: service

You Can't Win on Price

July 24, 2012

Another call today about a cable company stealing the deal because they are giving away the network. You can not compete on price!

The RBOC's have ceded the sub-$500 wireline market to the cablecos. VZ wants to clip the copper, which would destroy the DSL market - what there is it of it.

Posted in Marketing, bandwidth, broadband, cableco, sales and selling

Tagged: bundle, cable, cableco, marketing, sales, sellecom, selling, webinar : Related Tags: transport transit, market cablecos, market, selling, price

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