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| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

Internet

Wireless Combo is Merger 3

August 20, 2010

This week has been awash with mergers - the Intel-McAfee merger and the Windstream-Q-Comm merger are the big two. The third interesting merger involves two fixed wireless companies. Airband and Sparkplug announced that they merged and grabbed $20M in financing.

"Fixed-wireless companies Airband Communications and Sparkplug Communications today announced they have merged, creating the largest fixed-wireless company for businesses in the U.S., providing a full suite of voice and data services in 17 markets."

Mergers Only Mask the Truth

August 10, 2010

I have a firm belief that most mergers are just ways to make the books look better by clouding the numbers. Take this headline from the Morning Journal, "CenturyLink has profitable second quarter, primarily due to acquisition". I agree with that.

The telling number is the revenue or income or EBITA, but this metric: "CenturyLink added more than 29,000 high-speed Internet customers in the second quarter, compared to 28,000 in the second quarter of 2009, the company reported." HUH?

Is Broadband a Utility Now?

August 2, 2010

The way the FCC is examining, re-classifying and inquirying broadband, has it become a utility now?

There are many studies that show that cities with broadband do better economically than cities without broadband. The Iowa City study done about 5 years ago (that I read in Broadband Properties magazine) was one of the first studies that showed the economic benefit of FTTX. But it wasn't the last.

The American economy is in a slump (to put it mildly). We are competing globally against everyone in the world for a job.



FCC Report of Obviousness

July 23, 2010

The FCC released the Sixth Broadband Deployment Report. Due to the FCC changing the definition of broadband from the decade old standard of 200 Kbps downstream, most DSL won't count as Broadband since the FCC now defines broadband as 4 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream. In accordance with that, you would expect the report to state that hundreds of millions of Americans cannot get broadband, but  "The report, based on data provided by service providers for December 2008, found that between 14 million and 24 million U.S. residents (which is about 4.5% to 8% of the U.S.

Really: PAETEC Sells Fixed Wireless

July 20, 2010

While surfing, I came across this page from PAETEC about how it sells Fixed Wireless services. Fixed Wireless is not cellular. It's using radios and spectrun (mainly unlicensed spectrum) to connect a customer premise to the Internet or to another location.

In this case, PAETEC is using licensed spectrum to deliver from 20Mbps to 1Gig with "99.999% (or better) circuit availability".

Things are Round and Round

July 15, 2010

As one door closes, right? Well, WISPA is putting together a deal with DirecTV so that it's mainly residential wireless ISP base can grab some cash switching people from cable TV and Internet to fixed wireless internet access and satellite TV - kind of a cut the cable promotion. 

It used to be that independent ISP's had to worry mainly about the ILEC, but in the residential (consumer) market, the worry is cable - Comcast, Cox, TWC, BrightHouse, CableVision and Charter.

The funny thing is that some of the MSO's are collapsing their wholesale division. Just like the ILEC's, the MSO's don't really want someone else to own the customer. So even as Charter opens up its wholesale cable modem program to FISPA members, I have to wonder how long it will be in existence.

Channel Partners Expo in Boston in 2008 when the cable guys were all lined up on a panel handing out crumbs of info about their newly developed channel program, all anyone wanted to know was how much commission and would there be an added spiff.





Qwest Loses Forbearance

June 29, 2010

Qwest had a forbearance petition in at the FCC for the Phoenix metro area. It was denied by the FCC last week. It was denied in 2008 by Martin's commission as well.

Qwest claims that cable, VoIP and cellular are stealing all the market share.

Is Rural Wireline Profitable?

June 28, 2010

Exhibit A: Fairpoint Communications. Small rural telco merges with New England Verizon assets and billions in debt. The 3 state utility commissions were uneasy about the merger to begin with. Two years later, Fairport is struggling to get out of bankruptcy court.

3 Tricks to EoC

June 28, 2010

Ethernet over Copper is picking up steam. Hatteras Networks has something to do with that as they are the vendor for Metro Ethernet over Copper for former BellSouth. XO also has EoC in most of their markets. I saw an ad today from Tele-Pacific's EoC. Many of my clients - regional CLEC's - are selling G.SHDSL based services.

Is FiOS Crushing Verizon?

June 11, 2010

Is Verizon getting crushed by their FiOS project?

A source says that the labor force internally has shifted around so that the FiOS department is a separate stand-alone department without access from other departments. In other words, FiOS is a silo. That's not that unusual in big corporations, especially telcos.

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