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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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A Frank Look at the iPhone

May 7, 2012

From the NYTimes, "Randall Stephenson, AT&T's chief executive, shared some surprisingly frank comments about the iPhone." Stephenson regrets unlimited data pricing. Since moving to tiered data prices, the company has made more money. DUH!! He cries about "...it's a variable cost model.

Posted in cellular, wireless

Tagged: 3g, 4G, cellular, iphone, lte, spectrum, wireless : Related Tags: network, iphone, stephenson, apple

Duopoly Now Offering Home Automation and Security

May 7, 2012

Comcast, Bright House Networks, Cox, TWC, Verizon and now AT&T are offering home automation and security service. BHN and VZ are competing in the Tampa Bay market for all consumer services - voice, TV, broadband and now security.

"Bright House Networks' system does provide home security, it also helps users manage and monitor their energy, lighting and home appliances via the touchscreen. The security cameras connect to the touchscreen via Wi-Fi, while the rest of the peripherals in a home are connected to it via ZigBee." [CED Mag] BHN has a similar system as Cox, Comcast and TWC.

Posted in duopoly, security

Tagged: duopoly, home automation, security : Related Tags: house networks, bright house, automation security, security cameras, security, touchscreen

Big Mac versus Hamburger

May 7, 2012

When selling Hosted PBX and other unified communications, it's a lot like giving someone a Big Mac. Extra sauce, more calories, cheese and an extra patty for your customer, but all he wanted when he hit the drive-thru was a hamburger.

Posted in hosted uc

Tagged: hosted pbx, sellecom, UC : Related Tags:

VoIP Termination Squabble

May 7, 2012

On April 5, 2012, Sprint filed a petition for declaratory ruling raising a number of issues concerning the applicability of tariffed access rates to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)-originated calls. (Issues that the FCC should have already put to bed!) Basically, "Sprint is asking the FCC to decide whether it should pay CenturyLink for VoIP long-distance traffic. The question stems from a long-running federal lawsuit - filed in Nov. 2009 - CenturyLink filed against Sprint to enforce access tariffs on VoIP-originated calls." [fiercetelecom]

One of Sprint's points is: "because the VoIP originated traffic is jurisdictionally interstate, intrastate access tariffs cannot impose compensation obligations with respect to that traffic, even if those calls originate and terminate in the same state."

Posted in FCC, compliance, politics, voip

Tagged: centurylink, FCC, inter-carrier compensation, lawsuit, sprint, voip : Related Tags: originated calls, access charges, district court, calls information, connect america, access

Cincinnati Bell to Spin Off Data Centers

May 4, 2012

Last week when asked, I said that I did not see Cincinnati Bell spinning off its data centers. One reason was that the ILEC would be left with a declining wireline business and debt, which was the reason that CinBell had pursued a data center acquisition -- to offset the line losses.

This week, CinBell announced that it will examine spinning off Cyrus One as a REIT (real estate investment trust). The IPO will bring in much needed cash to pay down debt - $2.5B.With the data center business up 21% to $53M, CinBell is expanding the data center space.

Posted in cellular, data center, wireless, wireline

Tagged: data center, financials, ilec, wireline : Related Tags: revenue quarter, internet subscribers, speed internet, quarter million, territory lines, quarter

Transactional Agents Called Names

May 4, 2012

Over at CP, the transactional agents are being called Prostitutes and Zombies in opinion pieces. I find that sad considering that the Zombie comment comes from a guy who whined because he couldn't make huge commissions off call centers any more.

The one thing that most of these opinions neglect is that the World of Telecom is all about Transactions. It is a business based solely on Arbitrage.

Posted in CLEC, agents, cloud computing, commissions, telco, voip

Tagged: agents, att, cable, commissions, price war, telecom is broken, voip : Related Tags: transactional agents, market share, market, transactional, because, price

What Competition?

May 1, 2012

In this article about independent ISP's fading away, CenturyLink talks about competition of ILEC DSL - from cellular 3G/4G, muni Wi-Fi, and cable. There's also fixed wireless in some ares from independent ISP's, but that is mainly in areas without competition.

But competition is a myth today. VZ is co-marketing with cable now.

Posted in CLEC, broadband, cableco, duopoly, telco, voip

Tagged: broadband, cableco, clec, dsl, duopoly, ilec, smb : Related Tags: video services, competition, customers, space, pricing, market

WOW! to acquire Knology

April 27, 2012

More cable consolidation. Southeastern Knology is being acquired by WOW!, WideOpenWest LLC for about $1.5B with debt.

"The acquisition increases WideOpenWest's customer base and will help give the operator more leverage in programming contract discussions with content providers." This statement makes sense - scale and scale.

"WOW is paying about $1,875 per customer relationship," according to Bloomberg.

"The combined entity will have over 800,000 customers, and its products and services will be available to more than 2.8 million households in 13 states," according to the press release.

Knology offers Hosted PBX and Knology Matrix, our fully-managed direct-to-the-desktop solution (which looks just like Hosted PBX.)

Posted in PBX, cableco, mergers, voip

Tagged: cable, cableco, hosted pbx, mergers, voip : Related Tags: knology

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