On Rad's Radar? - ISP Archives

Has Verizon Stopped Repairing Copper?

2012-02-17T21:08:18Z

Over and over, I am hearing that Verizon has given up on copper. From repair issues to DSL to stripping copper out when FiOS is installed, the story seems to point to VZ looking to forget its copper plant.

in a discussion on LinkedIn about SLA's, one agent had this to say, "The absolute WORST cases I have seen have all been in the northeast where Verizon's copper is concerned. Verizon seems to have made the decision to put all efforts and funds behind their fiber build out (a good thing) but have completely sacrificed the quality behind their copper services such as T1. If your copper T1 goes down in New York, you might has well throw your hands up in prayer, because that's the only thing that will get it fixed."

Another commenter wrote, "Verizon in some places is actively ripping up copper as they lay fiber because they are not required to resell fiber to CLECs and ISPs at wholesale rates." This has been widely reported, because VZ doesn't want the expense of running to networks - copper and fiber. Plus the fiber doesn't have to be shared and the copper does. The copper means competition. Fiber means they just have to worry about cablecos, who quite frankly are kicking their butt.

Wholesale used to be a healthy business for ILEC's. Today, neither cablecos nor ILEC's want to wholesale anything. In fact, clients of mine in VZ regions have a lot of issues.

For example, "We had an outage about 3 weeks ago that lasted more than three days. This also affected [another local ISP] as I spoke him last night about the current outage. We [both have] a bunch [of customers still] out of service as well. They have been out of service since Monday. The last outage caused an exodus of customers and this one will do the same. Our guys have put in tickets, called to escalate many times. .... no one at VZ will listen. Ever. They simply close the tickets that we open."

It's a systemic problem - widespread - from the C-Suite down - the story has been that every company -- even wholesale customers - are the enemy and the Union and on-union workers must do everything they can to make it uncomfortable unless you are a direct VZ customer.

We have the case of a BK CLEC who had recorded conversations with VZ employees soliciting a customer who was down saying that it wouldn't happen if they were with VZ. [This has been a problem with both RBOC's since I got into telecom in 1999.]

Verizon faces up to $400,000 in fines after New York's Public Service Commission accused the company of not making service repairs in a timely fashion.

What do you do when the RBOC doesn't want to wholesale, doesn't want to repair, and just looks at the bottom line and the few metrics that Wall Street analysts can understand??

Many states don't even regulate the ILEC any more, so what do they do? It becomes the job of the FTC, the FCC and the court system. Talk about a deck stacked against the customer!

When our underlying telecommunications structure suffers, so too does our economic growth.

here's 2 problems with a fiber only strategy for an ILEC:

One, fiber goes out with power, so no 911 or dial-tone when the lights go out.

Two, the installation period for fiber is wicked long. Copper can be installed within two weeks. Fiber takes months. That hurts businesses. I have one moving in 3 weeks and to get 20MB of bandwidth he has to wait months. That won't work.

Ever think that just nothing in this country makes sense any more?

In the discussion about SLA's, the conclusion is to convince your clients to buy redundancy: 2 pipes. That's nice in theory but not in reality. The thing is that you have to set the expectation that if Internet or VoIP is integral to their business operations, no SLA is going to save them, redundancy and business continuity planning will. Otherwise, an outage will be a disaster that they have not planned for. It is not IF, it is WHEN.

3 Things Agents Need to Look at in 2012

2011-12-30T21:14:19Z

It will be a busy year in 2012 as all the carriers try to synergize their mega-mergers and get their back-office in order so that we can actually place orders.

Besides selling the traditional circuits - POTS, T1, SIP, PRI - there are some interesting things for an Agent to look at in 2012.

M2M is growing. We are seeing that the 3G/4G system is creeping in everywhere - from broadband backup systems to surveillance systems to fleet management to home healthcare monitoring to security monitoring. There are an unlimited number of ways that devices and the wireless network can interact. Think about the Kindle. There is money to be made in M2M.

More wireless but mixed with TEM. If you haven't moved your big accounts to TEM, 2012 may be the year you think about it. Auditing has increased in the last two years as governments (local, county, state) and medium businesses look for ways to reduce the ever-increasing telecom bills. (Cellular/3G/4G is big and growing, which is increasing the total cost of telecom spending.) Telecom Expense Management (TEM) can help accounts that spend more than $5K per month. It also makes the Agent the point person all the total telecom spend. It's a great way to become vital to the organization.

In addition, you can add Mobile Device Management. If a company has more than 250 employees, it likely needs help tracking laptops, data cards, cellphones and the like. There are software platforms for this to make an Agents life easy. This is yet another way to become integral to a clients business. Notice I'm not suggesting selling cellphones, but manage those assets for the business.

Lastly, there is Cloud and Managed Services. I'm going to skip cloud unless you want to sell apps to businesses. If you sell within a vertical, I would suggest that you certainly start selling apps into that vertical, because it will add revenue for you and make you the go-to person for all things IT and Telecom for that Vertical!

In Managed Services, we are seeing a few trends: hacking is increasing; security is lax; IT is pervasive in today's business environment but there is not enough money or staff to handle it all. That's where managed servcies comes in. If the company has a lot of empployees and a small IT staff, managed servcies would be a fit. Things to ask:

"What task would you like to relieve yourself of?"
"What routine task could we outsource to your ISP to free up your staff's time?
"You are consuming a lot more bandwidth, what are you doing about firewall and other security?"
"How are you tracking wireless spending and devices?"
"What would you do if a company laptop was stolen or lost?"
"How much private company data is on a smartphone or laptop? How much access does either device have to your network?"
"Do you backup your data regularly and off-site?"

You have to adjust for the changing times, unless you just want to push pipes. But your customers are under a strain to handle devices, billing, auditing, tracking as well as security and more. You can make some extra money -- and become more than just a sales guy -- if you move beyond the pipes and help your customers with the rest of the story. HUH? They buy those pipes from you for a reason. Help them with that.

Happy New Year!

How Good is BYOB VoIP?

2011-12-12T16:15:13Z

One of my coaching clients has had some issues with BYOB (bring your own broadband) ITSP's (VoIP providers) over the last couple of months. I have too. My Aastra IP phone died and I moved to an ATA, which has added an incredible amount of echo and tin to the line. He says that he has one way calls and the two of us have experienced garbled calls.

All that makes it difficult to sell VoIP to businesses.

Some of it - like the echo - is the CPE. Some of it is the configuration by the ITSP. Some of it is the broadband.

The ITSP should correct all issues with the CPE and the configuration - without doing finger pointing to the broadband. If you deliver BYOB VoIP, you can't spend all your time blaming the ISP.

If you buy and use BYOB VoIP, you can't expect POTS quality service either. Seriously. VoIP isn't POTS. And Voice over the Internet (which is what BYOB VoIP is) is going to have quality issues. Period.

My ISP has been giving me indigestion over congestion issues for a while, but what can you do?

The Duopoly – cable and telco – want to meter broadband because they want more revenue. They don’t want to upgrade the networks any more unless they can make more $$. They need the ARPU to go up, which in the current economic climate is just not going to happen. So the result is to decrease CAPEX spending on network upgrades. We see this on cellular networks. Despite spending $7-9B per year on the cell network, the cell networks still experience congestion and that is after the cellcos have capped consumer usage too! What happens when the wi-fi offload to broadband hits the point of congestion? Metering. (We already have capping in place on consumer broadband.)

How is this going to affect business down the road?

More and more workers are working from home. That means day time broadband networks are being used like never before. (It used to be around 3 PM when the broadband would get hit as kids came home from school.)

Smartphone users are switching to wi-fi when they can to save dollars and the broadband networks - more than 60% cable today - are congesting - at a few points. The bottlenecks are in the neighborhoods and in the peering points.

When David Byrd was talking about BYOB in his blog and stated, " For the most part, 90-95% of the time, this works out very well and an overwhelming majority of our customers are very happy," I believe he was talking about DIA not broadband. Big difference. A business broadband circuit of 10MB x 2MB is not the same as a T1. The numbers look better but broadband is best effort, shared bandwidth and DIA is a dedicated circuit. The quality of bandwidth is degrees different.

Many ITSP's have moved to looking for bigger deals where the business will buy DIA or MPLS or a dedicated VoIP circuit. Converged is a nice idea for a network, but at the end of the day, it is about quality, ease and of course price. With the cost of customer acquisition increasing, no company wants to lose a customer over quality. (Besides that churn number makes Wall Street unhappy. 2.8% is not a friendly number.)

For businesses with less than 25 handsets, BYOB VoIP may be the way to go, but think about having two broadband circuits - something to alleviate the VoIP quality issues that may arise.

Look for an ITSP that is connected to your ISP as that can alleviate some of the path quality issues.

Try a demo phone for a day or two to see what it will be like.

Fax, alarm circuits and other special needs lines will still have to be POTS for now, but that's okay - you'll have a back-up line in case something happens to the VoIP or the Internet or the power.

Is All Broadband Going Metered?

2011-12-05T20:56:30Z

Many rural fixed wireless ISP's meter their service for network management and costs reasons. The spectrum is finite, which means that wireless ISP subscribers can only get a set amount of bandwidth from that tower. The backhaul from the tower would be the other limiting factor.

In cable systems, the backhaul to the neighborhood is the bottleneck. The next bottleneck is the Internet gateway - how big is the pipe to the Internet that the cable system uses locally (and just how congested is it).

The DSLAM is the bottleneck for most neighborhoods. And the backhaul is the next bottleneck. It's tough to backhaul a 48 port mini-DSLAM with 2xT1, but it is done. Often.

As you have seen on the commercials, VZW and Ma Bell limit your mobile data to 2GB and 5GB. Sprint does too, except on your smartphone, but according to reports today, will be stopping that practice and moving to caps as well. T-Mobile has caps.

Ma Bell and TWC both trialed caps on consumer broadband. Supposedly this bombed but we know that Comcast and others have bandwidth caps for consumer broadband.

Now CenturyLink is capping DSL. CenturyLink is announcing the following Excessive Usage Policy (EUP), which will become effective in February 2012:

CenturyLink's EUP applies to all residential high speed Internet customers and is only enforced in the downstream (from Internet to customer) direction. Video services provided by CenturyLink PRISM™ TV are not subject to the usage limits. The policy has the following usage limits per calendar month:

• Customers purchasing service at speeds of 1.5Mbps and below, have a usage limit of 150 Gigabytes (GB) of download volume per month.
• Customers purchasing service at speeds greater than 1.5Mbps, have a limit of 250GB in download volume per month.

This will be one more pinch point for the consumer. Consumers are streaming music, movies, TV, living on social media, and sharing media with their friends. Stores this holiday season are selling TV's and DVD players that are all Internet-enabled to stream GoogleTV, Netflix, HuluPlus, Pandora, YouTube, CinemaNow and more. (Heck, you probably read my rant about all the buffering I go through with BHN.)

Not only that, so many tele-workers are using consumer broadband from home, working in The Cloud (so to speak).

VoIP, web/video conferencing, Skype, Citrix and virtual desktop, VPN and security wrappers, CRM, backup, virus and software updates - that cap will be hit quick in 2012.

The funny thing is that most of it was poor planning on the network operators part. And because they are a slave to The Street, who still see telcos as rate-of-return dividend checks, the consumers will get pinched. So too will providers, when the consumers find out that the backup or the VDI app or whatever is costing them $10 extra a month, it's out. Watch.

Well That Was Unsatisfying

2011-12-02T16:47:51Z

Tuesday night was kind of the last straw. While watching CinemaNow through my LG Blu-Ray player, the movie - 30 Minutes or Less - must have stopped to buffer 10 times and actually stopped 3 times - in 90 minutes!

I called my ISP, BHN of Tampa Bay, which is always interesting. First, they remotely re-boot the modem. Then you call back if that didn't fix anything. Then they make you do a speed test from their local site, which showed 8 MB x 0.8 MB. As I explained to tech support, that test doesn't mean anything except that last mile is good. I'm testing from Tampa servers that are On-Net! Then I tested with the FCC speed test site and DSL Reports test, which all gave different answers. Natch.

So the tech sets an appointment for today. "Maybe it's the modem." The tech shows up, looks at the modem and my router, and has me run a speed test from BHN. It comes back at almost 10MB x 1MB. "We're good here," he says and starts to leave. "What?!" I said. "I'm just the middle man here. The test shows you are getting your speed." with that he left.

The speed test only tests last mile - the controlled loop that is On-Net. The Internet is off net! My issues are that I have congestion to most streaming sites, which means that BHN network management is pretty poor. I don't know if they peer with YouTube or Level3 or Limelight or if they purchase transit from Level3, but that pipe is maxed out.

I get a mailer from VZ thrice a week to move to FiOS.

I pay $141 for triple-play plus an extra IP and the HD DVR. Granted the VZ price will be over $100 with fees, but I will get the NFL Network just in time (BHN doesn't carry it) and maybe an a better Internet experience. Who knows? The downside is that it will take VZ two days, a lot of holes in my walls and 4 pieces of equipment to install it.

Without a bundle, like buying DirecTV and Internet separate, the consumer gets raped. Way more than $100 per month.

I don't mind paying the money --- just give me what I pay for! BHN in 2 years has replaced the set-top box twice and visited 3 other times now. That's expensive for BHN and no fun for me. BHN didn't even try to upsell me to wideband or lightning or anything.

Anyway!

Today, VZW announced that it will buy SpectrumCo.'s 122 advanced wireless services (AWS) spectrum licenses, covering 259 million users, for $3.6 Billion. SpectrumCo. is a joint venture between Comcast Corporation, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks. This deal needs FCC approval.

Does this mean that cable is giving up on 4G? No. According to the BizJournal, the cablecos will become authorized agents to sell VZW products -- and at a future date become wholesale customers (MVNO).

FYI, ISP's are going about data caps the wrong way. Nice article.

XO Comments on L3-GC but not T-T

2011-07-13T19:20:57Z

XO Communications filed comments with the FCC that some media outlets said ripped the merger of Level3 and Global Crossing. Rodrego A. Byerly tweeted that it smacked of a spurned suitor. Maybe it was. XO issued a statement that the L3-GC merger was not in the public interest.

When I saw the tweet from @XOComm, I asked if they had filed comments against the AT&T-T-Mobile merger. The reply: We did not.

HUH? How can you say a merger of 2 of the 10 Tier 1 ISP's in the US (VZ, ATT, Qwest/C-Link/Savvis, XO, Cogent, NTT, Level3, Sprint, Global Crossing, Comcast) will affect public interest, but that the merger of 2 of the Top 4 cellcos isn't? Except that it doesn't really affect XO's business, since they aren't in the cell business, but are in the ISP backbone business. Just plain interesting.

I ripped on Sprint since Dan Hesse is everywhere jawing about the cellco merger, but no one is minding the Sprint store of fixing its own troubles to better compete, especially during the integration. (And get back to branding the wireline business you have. Sprintlink DIA is awesome!)

I'll rip on XO here for a similar reason. Carl Icahn has spent so much time and money playing Board politics that the XO boat has been sitting idle in the harbor. Icahn just won the ability to buy the last of the outstanding stock so maybe he will poo-or-get-off-the-pot at this stage. Meaning: sell it or invest in it. The employees and the marketplace distrust uncertainty. That would be more effective defense against a hyper-competitive backbone marketplace than a PR blitz against the merger.

Riding the IPv6 Wave

2011-07-12T21:54:03Z

Correction: Verio is now just the name for the NTT hosting division.

NTT America is looking to make a big splash in the IPv6 space in the Channel. NTTA has run a global IPv6 network for quite a few years. In fact, NTTA sponsored an IPv6 Summit in 2007.

This year is the start of a push to convert over to IPv6, the latest addressing scheme for Internet devices. Why are we switching? This year marks the exhaustion of available addresses in the IPv4 space. The old 192.168.0.1 has basically been used up because every household plugs too many Internet connected devices in: TV, laptop, Xbox, Blu-Ray player, set-top box, OTT video appliance, wireless access points, media servers, and even refridgerators. Of course, most of these do not carrier a live IP address but are numbered via NAT from that broadband router your ISP rented you. The router has a live IP address that looks like this 206.225.20.204. So does every smartphone. And every VoIP phone. So because everything has to be always-on, we exhausted the old numbering system (globally). The ISP's still have numbers to give out to customers, but soon they won't.

At some point, like now, we have to start selling IPv6 Internet bandwidth. The problem is that many devices are not IPv6 capable. That very thought makes Cisco drool.

In the meantime, we will have dual-layer boxes that will run both IPv4 and IPv6 -- just to make it really confusing for the over-worked IT staff. So NTT is pushing that Agents should start selling IPv6 now. In fact, the August TCA agent education webinar will be with me and NTT talking about IPv6 and why anyone should care.

There was a World IPv6 Day on June 8 to "conduct a 24-hour test to demonstrate the ability of selected Web sites around the world to move to a global IPv6-enabled Internet". It faired well. Now we just have to get out and sell a bunch of IPv6 bandwidth.

Another Hosted PBX Merger

2011-07-09T19:38:09Z

Tampa-based Telovations acquires North Carolina based FeatureTel, combining two Broadsoft providers. No financial details were released. Could this be a sign about the viability of the US Hosted PBX space?

Many of the Cloud Comm companies haven't grown as fast as their backers would like. Mainly it's a sales problem. As I mentioned yesterday, it's sold on price in many instances. There aren't that many ITSP's with a notable value statement or with a chief differentiator. This leads to a commoditization.

It's expensive to run a sales organization - paying sales people even when they aren't closing enough business to cover their expense. It's also expensive to brand your company nationally (as many have tried to do). Still others don't really do any marketing, marketing that might establish at least a regional reputation, which makes sales easier. Even better would be a marketing campaign that produced inbound sales calls, but let's not get crazy.

The funny thing is that the worst examples of VoIP IMO - MagicJack, SunRocket and Vonage - did spend on marketing and branding successfully. The marketing even overcame their customer service issues and quality.

Just as Unity Business was acquired by Telesphere and Geckotech was acquired by M5, there will have to be more consolidation of this type for a few reasons. The Broadsoft providers can merge almost seamlessly (at least on the customer side). The Broadsoft providers have huge amounts of cash invested in the softswitch, the complex licensing and their current customers - which doesn't leave a lot of cash for acquisitions and marketing campaigns.

And time is running out. Comcast, TDS, Windstream, and Cox have started rolling out Broadsoft-based Hosted PBX to the SMB market with two notable difference: each has a brand and each is a network operator, which means it controls the voice quality and has the price advantage.

We have seen what happens when the ILEC's enter a market late. DSL was brought to the nation by DLEC's - Covad & Co. Then dial-up ISP's got into the game. Then the ILEC's came in and grabbed it all up. The ILEC's were not just the vendor for the ISP's and DLEC's, but their chief competitor, who dropped retail pricing below wholesale rates (and caused the CLEC and ISP expensive challenges through its usual games of billing, install and repair problems). I fear that Hosted PBX will be the next DSL as the Duopoly marches in and takes the lion's share of the market.

As TV Slows, The Cloud?

2011-06-13T14:22:12Z

As I have been spouting for a while, telcos are getting into TV (and spending billions to do it) too late. The TV market is saturated - DirecTV, DISH, cable, telco and OTT. The economy isn't helping either as people ditch landlines and TV for mobile and Internet (bundles that the ISP's just don't seem to want to sell for some strange reason).

The cablecos tried wireless, but have dropped that notion in lieu of just partnering with Sprint (and Clearwire) again. (Still no Quad-Bundle actively being advertised.) The mobile and broadband space are both growing slowly (if at all). So where will growth come from?

For MSO's, the SMB space. [Even Bloomberg agrees.] The ILEC's - especially Ma and Pa Bell - have given up on small business. This leaves a great opportunity for regional CLEC's and cablecos to target and win that market. For cable, it's all about delivering cheap bandwidth and cheaper voice. The voice revenue is free money for them. (And money that keeps slipping out of the ILEC pocket.)

TWC made an interesting move in buying Navisite. It opens up the world of hosting, I mean Cloud, to the cableco. It gives them an edge in chasing B2B services, if they train their sales force on how to sell it. Selling transport and transit is easy. It's mainly upgrades and replacement services. But Cloud and managed services are a whole different ball of wax. At least 2 cablecos - Cox and Comcast - have jumped into the Hosted PBX space. The one advantage an MSO has over another cloud comm provider like Packet8 is that the MSO owns the network and can deliver quality of service on hosted PBX (or other cloud apps).

The Bloomberg article mentions that Cox is going to build its own electronic medical records platform. That too is an interesting move.

The article mentions that Ma and Pa Bell have bigger network footprints. Cablecos are inter-connecting. BHN and Comcast have NNI's in Florida. Soon the top 7 MSO's will be inter-networked enough to sell to most of the US.

This gives agents and VAR's a great opportunity to sell to the SMB space again. How Cloud will fit into this, we will just have to wait and see, but things could get interesting in 2012.

Service Provider Claims

2011-06-04T17:19:56Z

What's funny is when one service provider tells me how inept the other service provider in his region is. "We take customers from them all the time." I hear the same exact thing from the other service provider.

Two other funny things I hear. One is how every service provider has the most talented tech person in the whole world. The other is that most of the problems with the service is really with the customer.

Here's the problem with this type of thinking: It's too cocky. It stops improvement and lends a bias to your company that you do everything right and everyone else is wrong. It makes for unhappy customers.

I understand that you pride yourselves on your technical know-how -- and for some of you your self-worth and identity are tied up in your technical ability -- but technology keeps making leaps and bounds and no one can know everything.

The alternative companies - the independent ISP, the VoIP Provider, the regional CLEC - all say that "it is all about our service". If that were true - and coupled with the fact that you know more about the tech than anyone - shouldn't you understand inherently that you are going to have educate - and re-educate - your customers about their service with you? Shouldn't you be thankful that instead of being frustrated and switching providers, they call to ask that you lend them a hand?

Most customers leave because you become a line item bill that they pay and aside from your billing arrangement, the customer has no other personal relationship with you, your company, your employees or your brand. (Social media can help with that a little.) So the customer care is the only chance to shine and show value (and build trust). Your culture shouldn't be about how dumb the customer is or what a pain-in-the-ass they are or that they ask for too much help. It should be (according to your value statement about your service and your people) about helping them use your service as best they can. (And this is where referrals and WOM (word-of-mouth) enter the picture.)

Just a perspective to keep in mind.

A Little Anti-Trust Rant

2011-03-30T15:35:02Z

A CLEC filed suit against VZ for anti-trust this week. For those of you unfamiliar with operating a CLEC, ISP or OTT VoIP company, let me explain what I have seen over 11 years of servicing this industry.

Ma Bell has long standing promotions to compete against any quote from TWT. So long standing that by now they should be tariff rates.

Tariff is what the employees of the ILEC's consistently blame everything on. Tariffs are written by the ILEC and can be changed at will. Most of the ILEC services today are unregulated. Let me say that again: in most states even dial-tone is unregulated.

The ILEC's have systematically lobbied (read financially supported state and federal legislators) for de-regulation since 2004.

The ILEC's bill incorrectly in so many cases. Most CLEC bankruptcies result from billing controversy with the ILEC. In one case, a CLEC is routinely billed 10% wrong every month and the account exec doesn't even want to be bothered with fixing it. (It would be too difficult.)

I had a customer who had bought a frame circuit. It was in repair for a week. The ILEC tech told the end user that this would not have happened if he was a direct customer of the telco. How can that be? The line was down and the ILEC was having trouble fixing it. It was the ILEC's fault! (Unless the repair was caused by the ILEC.)

Often the repair tech would tell the end user to move back to the ILEC. Apparently, the CWA doesn't understand that the ILEC receives more revenue from Wholesale than from Retail.

Take the case of DSL. ILEC's only have to offer it to ISP's and CLEC's if they want to through a commercial agreement. The price that an ISP pays for a DSL loop in much of the 22-state footprint of one ILEC is the same as the retail price. The ISP also has to pay for an Aggregation circuit for DSL plus the Internet bandwidth, the router, etc. Yet the ILEC can offer all that for less than the wholesale rate.

Metro Ethernet at the 10MB speed is priced at $720 as a Layer 2 service offering. With Internet, it is less than $900.

DSL loop qualification is funny as well. At Ma Bell there is the wholesale LQ system and the internal LOOPY2 for account reps. They give different results.

When VZ turns up a customer to FiOS, they cut the copper. This is because VZ doesn't want to maintain two outside plant facilities, but it also eliminates that customer from getting CLEC services. It is similar when a customer gets U-Verse; they are removed from the DSL database.

At least one MSO sells metro ethernet to CLEC's and ISP's, then goes to the end user and undercuts them to go direct. Why? I have no idea. They just lost revenue!

Over and over again, there are true stories about ILEC anti-competitive tactics over billing, repair, and CPNI violations. COMPTEL should have been collecting these violations over their 30 year history. Imagine how much data they would have for Anti-Trust? In 2004, when I and others founded II4A and worked with the WBIA, we were trying to establish that database. Many of the independent ISP's didn't want to contribute to the database because they didn't think it would go any where. We used to file CPNI complaints with the FCC but they were ignored. (The FCC does not understand the word enforcement unless it's to fine someone for not filling out the right form on time. Again why do we spend the money for this Agency?)

Agents have had their own stories of woe with the carriers. Direct reps get better pricing. Dorect reps see the quote coming in and call the customer. Commission cuts. Yadda yadda.

AstroTel's anti-trust will be an uphill battle that will take years, sweat, stress and much, much money. The 3 cases that I have read about where an agent won a battle against a carrier took at least 6 years and close to $1M in legal fees, so good luck, AstroTel!

Lessons from the Keynotes

2011-03-25T19:07:55Z

At the Service Provider Summit, there were a number of keynotes. Here are the lessons that I took away.

Corey Potts of VoIP Innovations spoke about Sales Management. It is a challenge to manage salespeople if there are not processes in place. That's an important fact. Having CRM is a priority, but ensuring that it is used properly is even more important.

Brian Whorthen, CEO of Mammoth Networks, advised that business owners not get entrenched in their technology. That means recognizing when a product line, service or technology (like dial-up) is end of life, accept it, and plan for what to do next. Flexibility is the key to survival -- and even success - especially at Internet Speed.

A perfect example of a company learning to fail fast often is EarthLink who was tied to dial-up, tried cable modem, DSL, cellular (as MVNO Helio), muni wi-fi, and now CLEC as a Managed IP Services Provider.

Donny Smith of Jaguar Communications is an interesting guy. His company owns fiber-to-the-home, cable operations and a fixed wireless system (including unlicensed and 2.5GHz licensed). Donny gave a great talk about the future; about how some things always change while some things remain the same. He started by talking about the three lessons he learned from his grandfather.

You can't sell 19 cent service for 17 cents.
You have to pay enough for something.
You can learn a lot from horses. (Donny is a farmer.)
Apply enough thought and you can come up with a solution.
It's up to you what to harvest.

Okay. Donny gave us 5 lessons and a few laughs. It was a great show with 300 wireless providers, CLEC's and ISP's (right down I-4 from CTIA).

Marketing Your ISP

2011-03-22T16:37:19Z

Here's about 17 minutes of good conversation with a wireless ISP out of the St. Louis area. Nathan Stooke runs WisperISP and took time to talk to me about the business of broadband and marketing an ISP, including about Referral Programs. I look forward to seeing him in Orlando this week at the Service Provider Summit powered by WISPA and FISPA.

Talking with a Regional CLEC

2011-03-18T17:19:22Z

Twelve minutes with Clay Colvin of Georgia Business Net, a regional CLEC in Georgia, talking about the business of being a CLEC and why conferences (such as FISPA's Service Provider Summit) are helpful for small businesses. It was a good conversation about the CLEC world.

Comcast-NBC Merger is Failure Two

2010-12-27T16:14:25Z

This will be a far reaching rant but I think that it's time the FCC (and other F-Agencies) close their doors. Really. We have a huge deficit and really you just aren't honoring your duties or worth the expense any longer.

The Net Neutrality issue went on for months - and you had plenty of time to talk to the bazillion lobbyists, but couldn't find time to consider the consumer in all of this?

Think about this for a minute? What drives consumers to buy gadgets and broadband (in its many forms)? The content. If we can't get the content we want in a timely fashion, why would we buy the broadband?

It's not about products any more. It's about the Customer Experience. And when that sucks, your company is done. Don't believe me? Look what Comcast, Qwest and AT&T are doing on twitter so that the technorati don't damage their brand by ranting how much they suck.

The FCC STILL has not fixed Inter-Carrier Compensation. It has not tackled Special Access, which is very improtant for all over the communications infrastructure to work.

Then when it comes to mergers, it rubber stamps them. And there have been some doozies. Like the whole Fairpoint mess. How did you not see that coming? How?

We are in an economic stew, so you approve more mergers that result in more job losses. Smart. I'm not saying this is directly your fault, but the FCC is a contributing factor.

And as long as we are on mergers, let's talk about Comcast-NBC.

Apparently, the Commission has really had its head buried in paperwork not to notice the increasing number of carriage disputes in the last 2 years. Remember the Fox-Cablevision dispute? Consumers didn't get to see NFL and college football!!!

So now The FCC will okay the merger of the largest cable company, ISP, and content distribution system with one of the larger content creation companies. Let that sink in.

This same ISP is in a pissing contest -- err, peering dispute - with Level3, which may or may not be over Netflix.

This same cableco has had carriage disputes with many sports channels and already owns a few channels - like G4 and Versus.

This same ISP has been before the FCC before on blocking Vonage and blocking P2P traffic.

And even with some merger conditions, which it is doubtful that the FCC can or will enforce, this is bad for consumers. The FCC is charged with looking out for consumers. Not stockholders, Big Business, Corporate America, or anything else. First and foremost will this likely harm consumers? Inevitably, this will cause an increase in TV carriage rates, which already increase annually.

So to recap: The FCC is not looking out for the consumer. It seems to be making matters worse in some cases. So let's save the money.

The FCC oversees Spectrum, Broadband, Competition, Media, Public Safety and Homeland Security.

Spectrum? The FCC sold almost all of it. Now the companies resell it to the cellcos for huge profit. (See Qualcomm and Aloha). Don't know what they have left here to do but collect fees and forms.

Broadband. Done and done. NTIA and USDA have this covered now.

Competition? Don't make me laugh!

Media? Has it accomplished Diversity yet? Not really. Has it allowed consolidation to the point that Local is a joke? Yes.

Public Safety? Nine years after 9/11 and still not fully inter-operability in public safety communications. So failure.

I have no idea what the FCC can do for Homeland Security.

So all and all. Shut the lights on your way out, Julius.