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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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Where Will the Revenue Come From?

March 2, 2012

The screaming you hear is coming from execs at the global cellcos. For years we have been hearing how voice will be free. (Hasn't happened yet, but it has flat rated.) Now it seems the text messaging revenue arm is decreasing - 9% from last year globally.

According to this article, "Pinger and an explosion of smartphone messaging services -- like iMessage, BlackBerry Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber Media, Facebook Messenger and KakaoTalk -- have managed in just a few years to slash away at the important revenue that cell phone companies get from text messaging.

Posted in apps, bandwidth, cellular, spectrum, wi-fi, wimax, wireless

Tagged: cellular, metering, spectrum, wi-fi, wireless : Related Tags: revenue, messaging

One Really Big VAR

March 1, 2012

Presidio Acquires BlueWater is the announcement.

"Presidio, Inc., a leading provider of professional and managed services for advanced IT solutions, announced today that it has acquired BlueWater Communications LLC, a provider of high-performance, holistic IT infrastructure solutions to growing companies. The senior executive team at Presidio also welcomed industry veteran, Bob Cagnazzi, CEO of BlueWater, as the new Chief Executive Officer of Presidio, Inc. effective immediately. Presidio is owned by American Securities LLC and management."

That makes for a very big VAR.

Posted in VAR, channel, mergers, telco

Tagged: cisco, mergers, VAR, var : Related Tags: managed services, presidio, growing, services, managed, bluewater

Wi-Fi Only Phone Service?

March 1, 2012

Would that work? Wi-Fi only phone service? Bandwidth.com has launched Republic Wireless (about 19 months ago I guess). It is an MVNO of Sprint but the cell network is the back-up service. Primarily, the VoIP runs over any available Wi-Fi network to keep costs and quality down. ARS has a review here. ARS isn't happy that only one phone is available.

Not for nothing, if the cell phone you currently use has Wi-Fi capability, there are number of apps that allow you to make VoIP calls from yoru cell phone utilizing an available cell network (2.5G/3G/4G) or a Wi-Fi network. This isn't anything new. It's just another way to package an MVNO and arbitrage the service.

Posted in cellular, voip, wi-fi

Tagged: 3g, cellular, voip, wi-fi : Related Tags: phone service, phone, network, service, available

T-Mobile's Next Move

February 24, 2012

T-Mobile to Pump $4 Billion Into Network, 4G LTE Buildout. This is T-Mobile's next move on the heels of getting fiber and billions in cash from AT&T after the merger was nixed by the government agencies.

I have to laugh at this because Clearwire has clearly (heh) spent more than $4B to only partially build out a nationwide 4G network. How will T-Mobile do it for $4B?

Posted in FCC, cellular, mergers, spectrum, wireless

Tagged: 4g, cellular, dish, mergers, spectrum, sprint, vzw : Related Tags: sprint, mobile, network, metropcs, think, board

A Brief View of Integra Telecom

February 21, 2012

I interviewed Integra in Austin last year. Like quite a few interviews I do, I just can't find the time to write up the blog. It may seem like I do this blogging thing full time, but my bills still get paid doing consulting to ISP-CLEC-VOIP-MSO companies and being a telecom agent. It makes for a lot of juggling and long hours.

Posted in CLEC, channel, cloud computing, fiber, hosted uc, security, telecommunications, unified communications

Tagged: clec, collaboration, fiber, integra, managed services, microsoft, security, UC : Related Tags: integra telecom, firewall service, integra, telecom, microsoft, network

Why SIP Trunking is Not a PRI

February 21, 2012

"Integra Telecom has lab-certified the Fonality trixbox Community Edition (CE) IP PBX system to operate with its SIP Trunking service. The certification helps ensure interoperability and seamless operation between trixbox CE and Integra solutions" - see how specific that is? That's the difference between SIP trunking and PRI. PRI has 2 configurations on the switch. The NI-2 protocol was the primary configuration for RAS boxes and PRI cards on PBX boxes. National ISDN 2 is a standard.

SIP is made up of about 30 RFC's (or opinions if you will). So each carrier configures SIP differently. That's why for SIP trunks inter-operability is so important! Down to the model number.

Posted in PBX, sip trunking

Tagged: pbx, sip, sip trunk, sip trunking : Related Tags: trunking

What About Selling Cloud?

February 21, 2012

At The CPZ, the rest of the panel were cloud guys (VAR's and Hosted UC). This is a snippet of the conversation where the panel is talking about how transactional telecom sales are dead, long live the Cloud!

People deemed LD dead years ago (like when MCI went BK), too, but there are still a large number of agents and resellers making money on LD and pre-paid calling cards.

Until TDM is retired, agents will still be selling POTS, DSL and T1 - and making a living doing so.

Posted in CLEC, Marketing, VAR, agents, bandwidth, broadband, cableco, channel, cloud computing, hosted uc, msp, sales and selling, telco, voip, wireline

Tagged: agents, channel partners, clec, cloud computing, hosted pbx, sellecom, selling, telecom is broken, VAR, voip : Related Tags: sales trigger, telecom sales, cheap stuff, sales triggers, selling cloud, sales

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