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Proactive Care Puts Operators One Step Ahead

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

SysAid's Lifshitz: The Cloud Will Dominate ITSM Market

By Rich Tehrani on Thursday, May 16

Cloud computing has really become a household word with mainstream media outlets running stories on television about the growth in the space...

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Tagged help desk, itsm, mdm, sysaid

Avaya Takes Networking Lead in SPB

By Rich Tehrani on Wednesday, May 15

At Interop Las Vegas 2013 Avaya was demonstrating their real-world Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) solutions and while interoperating with Spirent, HP and...

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Tagged alcatel-lucent, avaya, hp, interop, lucent, mpls, networking, spb, spirent, zeus kerravala

Alianza Wants to Host Your Software Telco

By Rich Tehrani on Tuesday, May 14

The software telco(r)evolution representing the move from hardware to software is perhaps the biggest trend in the world of carrier telecom this...

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Tagged acme packet, alianza, etsi, hosted ims, nfv, oracle, software telco, software telco congress, virtualization

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AT&T Workers Walk

June 13, 2012

According to the LA Times, on June 8th, AT&T workers in California and Nevada staged a work stoppage for a day to protest a memo that impugned their work ethic. AT&T is correct that without the union workers, AT&T would save a fortune. ILEC's have buckled under the strain of union benefits, payroll and pensions. Just because they negotiated these things doesn't mean that they should have planned for them.

Posted in CLEC, politics

Tagged: att, strike : Related Tags: union workers, union, workers

Broadsoft Enhances Trunking

June 12, 2012

Besides the stock price changing, Broadsoft is enhancing SIP trunking.

"BroadSoft, Inc. has announced the release of an enhanced SIP trunking solution, enabling service providers to add unified communications and mobile applications to their SIP trunking offering with speed and ease. With it, service providers can increase the value of their SIP trunks and improve their Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)." [UCSttrategies]

I wonder if they are enhancing SIP licensing as well. One of the big issues for Broadsoft based service providers is the licensing fees, especially the maintenance payments on unused licenses.

Posted in PBX, broadsoft, sip trunking, voip

Tagged: broadsoft, hosted pbx, tdm, voip : Related Tags: service providers, insight research, broadsoft based, providers continue, providers, broadsoft

The Patent Office

June 12, 2012

Short rant here: The Patent Office has to update itself to the 21st Century. Read this article from @techdirt about reselling goods - books, watches, etc. - and how the courts have ruled against resale. Ridiculous. Where has common sense gone?

Tagged: lawsuit, patent : Related Tags: patent office

The Answer to Flat Revenue

June 12, 2012

The markets are flat. Broadband, voice, TV and cellular. There are more cellphones activated than there are people in the US. The average home has 4 Internet enabled devices.

So what do you do if you are a Cellco and more than 60% of your revenue is wireless?

Posted in cellular, spectrum, wireless

Tagged: arpu, cellular, iphone, price war, spectrum, sprint, vzw : Related Tags: revenue, devices, monthly, selling, household, network

The New VoIP Giant

June 7, 2012

8x8 has hit $100 million in annual revenue making them the number 2 hosted VoIP provider (behind Comcast). 8X8 put up some good numbers last quarter.

At $100M, the company has proven that they can organically grow revenue. The churn is coming under control and the company is looking up-market.

Posted in ISP, PBX, cableco, mergers, metaswitch, voip

Tagged: cableco, hosted pbx, mergers, paetec, voip, windstream : Related Tags: bright house, windstream might, revenue, business, customers, frontier

Verizon is in the News a Lot

June 6, 2012

Hands off the Internet!

Sen. Alex Padilla: Bill will preserve hands-off regulatory approach toward VOIP.

VZW and T-Mobile are at odds over SpectrumCo spectrum with Verizon saying T-Mobile is hypocritical about spectrum. "Verizon told the FCC in a filing Monday that T-Mobile is two-faced in opposing the SpectrumCo deal because its parent company is telling investors it has excess network capacity while T-Mobile is telling the FCC it has too little." That seems to be typical for both T's - tell the FCC one thing and investors another.

Posted in FCC, broadband, cellular, spectrum, video, wireless

Tagged: antitrust, att, broadband, cellular, FCC, healthcare, lawsuit, spectrum, video, vz, vzw : Related Tags: spectrum verizon, spectrum, mobile, sprint, verizon, patients

Top 5 Reasons to Work With an Agent

June 4, 2012

One thing you may have to answer as an Agent is "Why should someone buy from you?" They could call the carrier directly. Here are the top 5 reasons a business customer should work with an Agent.

Number 1: Saves time! Instead of calling around to collect quotes, the agent can do that more efficiently.

Posted in TCA, agents, certification, channel

Tagged: agents, certification, channel partners, CTP, TCA : Related Tags: agent, number, customer, carrier

JAB May Buy Keyon

May 31, 2012

"Its a typical situation in these typical times..." Dave Matthews Band

It seems that ISP roll-ups just don't last long. Volaris anyone? This story has a Tampa flavor, since KeyOn Communications Holdings Inc., acquired Broadsoft's second customer ever, CommX, in June of 2011 (last year).

Posted in ISP, mergers, voip, wireless

Tagged: BK, mergers, voip, wireless : Related Tags: keyon communications, keyon, commx, million, wireless, business

Tidbits About the GC-L3 Combo

May 29, 2012

I sat through a 65 slide presentation from Level3 about the integration of Global Crossing. The stats are nice for trivia night. Maybe someday CVX will hold a Telecom Jeopardy so I can use this trivia to win prizes.

Level3 holds the original VoIP patent.

Posted in Internet, conferencing, fiber, mpls, training, voip

Tagged: bandwidth, conferencing, fiber, internet, level3, microsoft, mpls, vpn, WAN, web 2.0 : Related Tags: conferencing options, market share, global crossing, level, network, global

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