On Rad's Radar? - mobile Archives

Are We Still Talking About the Phone?

2013-05-15T16:11:08Z

It is still about the phone.

Cell companies are stuck. After years of leveraged cool handsets to drive sales, cellcos are stuck as hardware providers - subsidized hardware too.

Cellcos aren't alone. VoIP providers are stuck in the hardware space too - phones, headsets, switches and routers.

On the one hand, the customer is getting it all in one stop and the ITSP (VoIP provider) can ensure that the gear inter-operates with the VoIP service. So that is good. However, there is a capital outlay involved, a lease arranged, or some other factor that can deter the sale.

Subsidizing phones plays heck with cash flow for cellcos. The subsidized handset results in more risk for the phone company, since if the customer goes belly up, they may not collect that ETF. The value of the contract is shadowed by the handset subsidy.

Even with BYOD (bring-your-own-device), the phone companies are still stuck with phones, with hardware - and the logistics and support that come with it. Their support costs would increase dramatically and customer profitability would decline, if they abandon hardware right now.

Consumers haven't separated the device (the phone) from the phone companies (cellcos or ITSPs) or from the phone service. If the device breaks or voice quality is poor, the phone company (VoIP or cellular service provider) takes a consumer satisfaction hit.

The phone companies have to start planning for a time when they can distance themselves from the device. What will support look like? How will they market their service?

Some Interesting Reads

2013-03-13T13:58:17Z

Zayo CEO Dan Caruso wrote a good blog titled "Is Bandwidth Production Lucrative?". In the wake of Jim Crowe stepping down at Level3, Caruso's analysis of the fiber players in an interesting read.

Personally, I think these CEOs - Crowe, Hesse, and others - have to take more responsibility for revenue, integration, value and culture. The role of CEO is more than just setting some ambiguous vision that your reports then have to crystallize and execute on.

Best quote from Mobile World Congress:

"Openness is not something to be afraid of. There are lots of business models available. But openness is also about being open to innovate." - Jolla CEO Marc Dillion (launched Sailfish at MWC)

FCC and FTC gave the green light for T-Mobile to merge with MetroPCS. To VZW and ATT, this is a yawner. To the consumer, it will just eliminate one of the all-you-can-eat players.

This news comes as Gary Kim writes about the spectrum crunch that never came. Please note that all of the Top 5 cellcos still have a bunch of spectrum that they have not deployed yet. It bears repeating: there is plenty of spectrum that they have not deployed yet! (Despite what Hesse spouts to the press. He likes being in the spotlight, which is fine, if someone else was running Sprint.)

Susan Crawford wrote an article about the lack of wireless competition. Every flavor of broadband - terrestrial or wireless - has clear winners and losers, but mostly losers, who we call customers.

I have beat this drum before but all the value in the US economy is in knowledge and innovation -- it is the Internet Economy. Stifling that due to profits for a few companies is not going to make the US competitive in a global race.

Nice blog about small business, Obamacare and the opportunity for channel partners.

In SAAS, the secret sauce is data integration - which fails almost 20% of the time!

One last one: at CPExpo, a channel AVP at ATT was given my book and read it and took the time to come over to say that he enjoyed it. Kind of a highlight at the show.

Predictions for 2013

2012-12-19T19:15:00Z

CenturyLink Biz has an ebook out with predictions for 2013 and beyond. M2M, mobility, cloud - all just mind blowing stuff . It's prediction time obviously. Let me say that 2013 can go a couple of ways - DC gets its collective act together to improve the financial situation or it doesn't. The economy will swing with either path - good or bad. We have already seen layoffs and threats of more. The only positive I see is bankers actually being penalize for fraud. That said what is in store for 2013?

Well, the FCC's pace for any case is slow and slower, so they will likely not get to the copper clipping and IP transition until 3Q2013 at the earliest. meanwhile, CLEC's have to be vigilante to document cases of copper clipping, because all the money that they - Integra, Megapath, TelePacific, XO, Windstream - have invested in EoC doesn't work without said copper. I think they will be fine until 2014 on this.

That said, CLEC's have to accelerate their plans for OTT services like cloud and Managed IT. When the copper plant disappears, wholesale (from fiber providers and cablecos) will get expensive. The money will be in Layer 7. I have often said that it was going to be Layer 1 or Layer 7. Without a network that you own, it will be a fight for apps and services. Everything will look like Office 365 - where 42,000 Microsoft partners are selling it for very little margin.

Here's the thing: more businesses are moving to the cloud for so many reasons - mobility just being one of them. Some CLEC's, VARs and even Agents will migrate to a cloud services brokerage model. That will work for slinging Hosted Exchange, SharePoint, CRM, simple backup, even VPS. Network will become a separate sale and negotiation.

I'm still shocked that no one has rolled out vertically based integrated bundles yet.

So mobility will still be huge in 2013, but with the new shared data plans, the monthly bill will be increasing, so businesses (and consumers) will be looking for alternatives. Wi-fi will be significant. When you add in mobile data caps and consumer cable caps - and metering - there will be a net effect on cloud services and OTT services.

When you examine the backlash yesterday on the Instagram privacy gaff (right after Facebook finished acquiring them for $715M), you have to wonder how much longer the online phenomenon continues. Privacy is non-existent. You have to be off-the-grid and paying with cash to be beyond corporate and government spying. I think we will see a little more backlash in 2013 - enough that FB and other companies see a dip in usage and corresponding advertising sales. Have FB and twitter peaked?

The companies to watch in 2013:

RIM and Alcatel because they are re-inventing;
Avaya because of its crushing debt;
Bright House due to its Telovations acquisition and to see if it is the first cableco to chase business outside of its region;
8x8 and similar OTT Hosted PBX players like FreedomIQ;
the Cloud Communications Alliance, especially the members who have not been acquired yet. If Hosted PBX doesn't explode in 2013, it never will;
Sprint because Clearwire+DISH+Softbank = a big ugly mess with Hesse;
Verizon but specifically its OTT hosted PBX service, VCE;
Dell as it continues its shift to cloud services from hardware;
Tech Data - between TDmobility and the Microcorp deal - 2013 will be telling;
AirWatch since MDM is huge and they are being sued;
Master Agencies that have to figure out relevancy in 2013.

For Agents and VARs, 2013 is the year they have to put a plan together. No more waiting. Too many VAR's are already jumping on the telecom/network bandwagon and not nearly enough Agents are jumping into the Managed Services and Cloud space. For Agents, 2 resolutions for 2013 would be (1) partner with a VAR or two; and (2) cross-sell services to grab more of the total wallet share of your customers. Look to revenue per customer and lifetime value of each customer as the most important metrics. (Mainly because they are.)

For VAR's, they have seen some big changes from Microsoft - Small Business Server's end of life as well as the way Office 365 was sold. VAR's also witnessed CLEC's - like Cbeyond and EarthLink - make a big splash in launching managed services and cloud offerings. In 2013, VARs will need network/telecom to make up for the revenue dips. Locally in Tampa, we have seen some Microsoft partners go to programming and integration services in place of the old model of SBS and Exchange. For all of cloud adoption, Integration is the key to any business process outcomes. There aren't nearly enough programmers to do all the necessary integration.

In the Google world, there are companies making money supporting and integrating Google Apps. Backupify, Batchbook, Insightly are just 3 companies that integrate with Google Apps for CRM and backup. As this ecosystem becomes more complete, Microcorp's deal with NeoNova could prove brilliant.

It is this type of package or bundle that most businesses want. Do they want stand-alone Hosted Exchange? Notsomuch. They want a complete package of inter-working software - the Hosted PBX integrated with Outlook and the browser - like they have on their smartphone!! It confuses me that the smartphone is more integrated than a laptop, Mac or desktop.

They want their CRM to integrate with all of it too. If Xobni can pull in all that social data, why can't a plug-in for CRM?

It's this complete solution that is needed. No idea what company will roll it out first or if it will be in 2013.

It's About Stats and Studies

2012-12-04T16:34:50Z

Here is a collection of some stats and studies for your reading pleasure.

(1)

Mary Meeker's 2012 Presentation On The State Of The Web is a good read despite being heavily mobile. She spends quite a few slides pointing out how SO many industries have been disrupted side-swiped by technology, especially Internet enabled apps.

(2)

"The worldwide Ethernet switch market, which had grown in large part due to the adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology in the data center, contracted in the third quarter, with revenue dropping 4.4 percent, according to analysts with IDC." [eweek]

(3)

Survey Finds 'Death of the Landline' as Most Disruptive Force to US-based Communication Services. I would have to agree. That copper plant impacts a lot of telecom.

(4)

"According to a recent market study made by Infonetics Research, the third quarter of 2012 saw a few positive changes in the leading business PBX telephony systems. Cisco was found to be the leading PBX business phone system vendor (for the 5th straight quarter), followed closely behind by Avaya." [source]

"the high roller in the Unified Comminications (UC) market is Mcrosoft, with a rise in revenues of approximately 40% over second quarter profits." You have to read it carefully. It's just about revenue growth. Diane Myers continues: “UC applications have been a real sweet spot. The demand for tools that aid employee productivity and flexibility is fueling growth in this segment, and Microsoft’s Lync has been the primary beneficiary, enjoying over 40% sequential growth in the third quarter.”

"Revenue is declining at a faster rate than shipments: for the first time, the average revenue per PBX line slipped below $200." This is globally in the whole IP-PBX space.

(5)

Frost & Sullivan's new report "North American VoIP Access and SIP Trunking Services Market 2012: Broader Market Acceptance Drives Robust Growth" to their offering. This couldn't be more obvious. SIP Trunking and VoIP are growing. No kidding. The PSTN is closing and copper is clipping. Cable Voice is all VoIP, even the PRI's. Try to buy a TDM PRI sometime, Frost & Sullivan. Oh, and there was consolidation in this space in 2011. See what I mean?

(6)

Garrett Smith on the video conferencing market.

(7)

Lastly, a beautiful infographic from GigaOm on the state of the US Broadband market!

News Items for Your Viewing Pleasure

2012-11-26T19:36:02Z

I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving break. Thanks for reading my stuff! I appreciate it. A bunch of news items for your consumption.

Good Technologies sues AirWatch and MobileIron over patent and marketing infringements.

8x8 scored a couple more patents.

Digital Rights Group Slams Verizon's Anti-Neutrality Argument: Verizon claims that open Internet/network neutrality rules violate its free speech rights! [I won't rant here. I won't.]

Cool video hangout with some of my pals talking about the New Service Providers - with Dave Michels, Alex Doyle, Larry Lisser and Brooks Robinson.

The Idea of Office is changing! "A new survey by Intelligent Office finds that people are choosing where they want to work rather than being assigned a standard work place location." [source]

What Obamacare Means for Small Employers in 2013. Nice set of charts about expectations.

Healthcare experienced more security breaches than any other industry in 2011! "More than 21 million patients have had their medical records exposed to hackers during the past three years alone." That is a lot of HIPAA violations! Physical records have the same security needs as electronic ones. More about HITECH from the Level3 blog and from the US Signal blog.

Telephony Partners follows tw telecom with electronic signature of contracts! It's a little strange for some customers, but e-sign is easier than printing, signing, scanning and emailing.

The Changing VAR World

2012-10-16T01:44:04Z

Opening evening at UBM's BoB Conference was a panel discussion about the change in the VAR and MSP community. This is a collection of tweets about the panel discussion #bob12.

Social Media (SM) , mobility, are cloud - threats to some, opportunities to some - both to many.

"Behave like a three-year old: fall down, learn something, try again."

How do you scale marketing and lower customer acquisition costs in cloud?

The Channel is hiring sales <-- luv to know where they are finding them.

Amazon has $1bill cloud biz and not even 5 people on the street.

Amazon, folks, offers just 2 services in self-serve fashion.

RainKing, Salesforce, radian6 (social media), data mining to understand clients better.

Vendors need scale, but the channel needs customer intimacy (and the channel needs to build its own brand).

Manufacturers do not like the channel. Channel Partners are not enamored with the the manufacturers either.

Biggest Issue: Mainly vendors don't understand what the channel does. Manufacturers/vendors do not like that channel partners are not exclusive and offer choice to the marketplace. [Telecom vendors are the same way!]

@UBMChannel: Number 1 trouble w/ vendors: they don't understand solution provider business and value. "We are not just vehicles to end customers" #BoB12

@UBMChannel: Marketing has changed as businesses do. Moving from finding customers to how do customers find you? #BoB12

Overall, even as the marketplace is changing, manufacturers are slow to change. Vendors still want the channel to just get them customers, push their products and get out of the way. The Channel now wants to build a brand, retain customers, increase wallet share, and sell managed services (some of which will be their own). Unfortunately, there isn't a huge ROI on that strategy for vendors. In Telecom as well.

A final point by the panel revolved around Gartner pushing the Cloud Services Broker model on VAR's. The panel thought that was a ridiculously low margin business - basically, transactional. It is likely going to become what the VAD (value added distributors like Ingram and Tech Data) will become in some sense.

Here's the flipside to that. Right now VAR's have accounts with both Ingram and Tech Data (and likely at least one other distributor like SYNNEX, D&H, CDW, Insight). When looking for hardware, VAR checks to see who has it in stock, at which distribution center, and for how much. When things switch to cloud services, it is unlikely that VAR's will have accounts at all 3 because they are not going to manage SAAS accounts across multiple vendors like they do now. It will be about going with 1 or 2 plus having their own.

The panel noted that we are in the midst of a change in the VAR business to a completely new organization - structure, personnel, skills, compensation, financing, marketing, sales and metrics will all be different when it is all done.

Sales is changing. Not only what is sold, but to who - IT is not the only buyer in an Enterprise any more. IT doesn't own the desktop anymore due to consumerization of IT. CMO and CFO buy differently from CIO. Can IT sales people sell to buyers other than IT?

Plus sales isn't about low hanging fruit anymore. It's about harvesting the whole tree. Acquiring customers is getting harder and more expensive. Retaining customers will be huge. Acquiring customers is different now. CLIENTS FIND YOU NOW, via blogs, social media, SEO, PPC. Are you involved in that???

The three panelists are making money now on Help Desk, End user Compute Space (which can include VDI) and in Global Managed Services (including help desk).

Mobile Apps Are Not News

2012-10-03T13:44:57Z

Received yet another handful of press releases centered around mobility. Mainly it was about a new Android or iPhone app for UC. This is NOT news! Seriously. The desk phone is being replaced by mobile devices for knowledge workers and sales people. If you don't have a mobile app - that is news, because you will be extinct soon.

Really, the dude at Apple that has to approve all the iOS apps for the store must be thinking, "What? Another freaking VoIP app for the iPad? Aren't a thousand enough?"

Some Moves That May Seem Like News

2012-10-02T04:17:34Z

Who is going 100G? Both XO and Spread Networks announced its deployment of 100G technology. The surprise? Bright House Networks announced that it will extend its relationship with Fujitsu and utilize that vendor for 100G in its metro network.

Comcast is going after E-Rate business - through the channel! They will be trying to hit the ILEC's in the breadbasket with this move. The RBOCs are most vulnerable here since neither ATT nor VZ allow agents to sell e-rate.

Comcast hits its 20th state with Business VoiceEdge, its Broadsoft based cloud-based voice and unified communications solution, in California. Competitors need to pay attention, since Comcast sells inexpensive Hosted PBX on its own network -- read No QoS issues!

TelePacific has made its SmartVoice PRI, SIP and business-line services available on a nationwide basis.

EarthLink already has an MVNO deal with Sprint from Deltacom. Now ELNK has a wholesale agreement with Clearwire for "high-speed fixed and mobile broadband service to consumers."

FairPoint taps marketing exec Barbara Dondiego as new CMO. Not picking on Dondiego - and don't know her - but she hasn't worked at any successful telcos - DeltaCom, WilTel, and MacLeod - so BK or bought.

MetTel hits 100K seats of Broadsoft. This makes them 5th by my calculations: Comcast has about 300K; 8x8 has about 210K; M5/Shoretel Sky has about 140K; and West IP has about 100K approximately.

TiVo settled with VZ for $250M over patent dispute over DVR software. VZ TV is now at 4.5 million subs - and will pay monthly licensing fees for those subs to TiVo. VZ also "agreed to pay CloudTV developer ActiveVideo more than $260 million over the video-on-demand feature." This has something to do with the VZ-Redbox video streaming lab test.

6 SEO Myths by INC

Larry Lisser is prepping for another awesome StartupCamp Comms at ITEXPO this week, but still put out a blog post. Note that Evolve IP bought IPiphany and Nuance scooped up Ditech - for the Phonetag service.

Twilio has new money and a new CMO. Oh, and a deal with ATT.

Strategic Thinking Necessary for SPs

2012-09-26T20:45:09Z

Strategic Thinking is needed for service providers to get through the upheaval of the next couple of years. The last couple of years have been all belt tightening and cost cutting -- to the point that service delivery, sales and customer support have suffered greatly.

Google Says Mobile Operators Have To Think About Service Delivery, Not Data Plans - "meaning they have to go beyond monthly subscription fees and add value to the types of services OTT players, content providers and others are currently driving."

In an ITEXPO panel about Hosted versus Premise, the panelists were discussing business drivers such as BYOD, Security, lack of skills, and integration of BPI (business process improvement) as reasons that businesses are moving to UC&C (unified communications and collaboration).

Beyond just what product will you (try to)sell, service providers have to think about what their customers need and will pay for -- as well as can you sell it?

After the sale, can you Integrate it, On-board the customers, and support them? These will be three integral factors in customer retention - a metric that is becoming more significant as the revenue pools flatten.

Gary Kim headlines that SP's are becoming irrelevant. "At some level, it is hard to argue with the notion that what people "want" is the applications and services the Internet provides, and not "broadband access" as such."

3G, 4G, cable, DSL, wi-fi, satellite, fixed wireless - consumers couldn't care less. They just want reliable broadband to enable them to hit the Internet for the apps that they want like Facebook and Amazon and itunes.

Security, BYOD, and Managed IT are not pipe related, but are ways that service providers can add value to their base. At the end of the day, the SP's have to offer more value than OTT players or more value than just dumb pipe if they want to stay relevant.

Grow Your Business Without Sacrificing Options

2012-09-21T21:22:24Z

One of my ITEXPO panels is on Wednesday @ 11 AM with Kevin Kelleher of ICON Voice Networks; Bobby Mohanty of Vertical; David Scult of Fonality; and Debbie Jo Severin, the CMO of 8x8.

With three leading options in the market for IP-based phone systems - on-premises, hosted (cloud) and hybrid-hosted - consumers may have a difficult time deciding which model best fits their business needs. We will be discussing four issues facing businesses today - BYOD, BPI, Mobility and Security - and how the premise and cloud options deal with those issues.

What's Happening?

2012-08-24T20:34:01Z

Broadview Networks filed bankruptcy, albeit a pre-packaged debt reduction plan.

CenturyLink and Mediacom join the broadband cap club. Mediacom has a low end cap of 150 GB. Ouch! For cable companies, metering and caps are about preserving the TV money, but telcos should be cap free.

Are you a Start-up? Pitch your company at StartupCamp in Austin!

President's Club contests are popping up. Microcorp has recruited 6 carriers - M5, Level3, Comcast, EarthLink, Cbeyond, ACC Business - to help Agents qualify for the trip. WTG just announced their first President's Club destination: Puerto Rico. And Telepacific has a President's Club, too.

FCC's 8th Broadband Progress Report is out. About 30% of the US population does not purchase fixed line broadband - but they may get broadband at work or via 3G. Only 6% are stranded on dial-up, so I am having a hard time swallowing all the money that CenturyLink, Frontier and Fairpoint are getting in federal funds to build out - at approximately $775 per user!!

EarthLink's customer profile according to Mike Toplisek: "In large part, they would fit into the range of five employees up to 1,000 employees. Probably 95% of that customer base fits in that size."

The Economist has an article about OTT (over-the-top) VoIP apps and their effect on mobile operators.

The FCC approved the sale of SpectrumCo spectrum to VZW. There were a few restrictions on the joint marketing venture between the two.

FCC Suspends Special Access Rules, Will Collect Data To Modernize Them.

The Alternate to Cloud

2012-08-15T20:09:00Z

For Agents that just don't want to go cloud, there are some alternatives. In my latest book, SELLECOM 2: Selling Cloud Services, there are a few products that Agents can sell that still fall inside the Replacement services umbrella. T1, broadband, cellular, voice are all replacement services for the transactional agent. That road is bumpy. It won't take much for you to make some extra revenue.

One way is SIP Trunking. Everyone offers it. Find someone you like and trust and sell that, although if you are reading this blog, you probably are selling SIP Trunking already.

Next up is Conferencing. Web, audio and video conferencing are coming of age. Most companies use some kind of conferencing, you just have to get in the habit of asking about it. It's as easy as asking them if they use Webex. Then go into your pitch about quoting them a cheaper rate. You will see a couple of conferencing companies with booths at CPExpo in Orlando in 3 weeks.

Another easy one is efax. If you are selling VoIP, what do your customers do about faxing? One answer is efax from you.

One more quick one for your customers is email. Hosted MS Exchange, Blackberry Enterprise Server, Office 365, Zimbra, Zoho and Google Apps are all answers to the email question. Almost all of them pay you a commission through a vendor. (Google doesn't.) Zoho just rolled out email marketing into their suite of services. J2 bought Landslide.com to create CRM with email marketing. J2 also sells efax. Faxbetter.com is owned by my pal and is always looking for partners to sell 50+ numbers. The efax and email space are a nice little sale that will make you money.

Now to hit two bigger options that may be considered SAAS, but them conferencing, efax and email are all cloud services too. Just most folks don't look at it that way.

Telecom Expense Management is finely coming into its own. Many master agencies - like PARTNERIQ by TBI, INSITE from Microcorp - are offering TEM. Your typical medium sized business problem has more than one contract for telecom. Multi-location businesses have a number of circuits at each location. TEM allows for the centralization and organization of billing and contract data. If you sell it, you end up being the outside telecom department for that business. Isn't that what you want? That's always been my goal.

The final thought for Agents is MDM, mobile device management. There are so many reasons to offer MDM. "One laptop is stolen every 53 seconds! 70 million smartphones are lost each year, with only 7 percent recovered."

"MDM is in essence software that secures, monitors, manages and supports mobile devices deployed across mobile operators, service providers and enterprises and its s main objective is to provide a high level of security on a mobile communications network, while supporting multiple devices and continuing to reduce cost and downtime," writes TMCnet. TDMobility and MetTel are just a couple of vendors that offer agents and VAR's the MDM service to sell.

TEM and MDM offer "a complete view of customer spend, billing; Inventory and trouble ticket management." They are a way for you to differentiate yourself from other agents and other sales teams, while increasing your own profitability per account.

We hear a lot of talk about cloud - and technically these are cloud too - but you have to add to the catalog of services you offer today to become a trusted advisor. TEM and MDM are just two ways to have a value based conversation with your customers.

Cloud Outages

2012-07-31T20:46:21Z

I have seen this headline a couple of times in the last month: Cloud Customers at the Mercy of Providers! It's just ridiculous. We left a five-nine world a while ago. Redundancy does not fix everything. And to put it into perspective, to run redundancy on your own Hosted Exchange server would be expensive from a labor and hardware standpoint. It would also be complex and not automatic.

Even when youtry to build in redundancy (like Netflix did by utilizing different sectors of AWS), it sometimes fails. We have seen outages this year by Google, Yahoo, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, twitter, Rackspace, Salesforce and probably others I am unaware of. I don't think this will slow down cloud adoption. People choose cloud for reasons that have nothing to do with redundancy. Cloud is financially efficient (as Savvis puts it), flexible, and available from any authorized and enabled device. It also removes a required skill set off the books. In other words, businesses can focus on their own business and not on tech or IT. In addition, the remote/virtual/mobile workforce grows every year, driving more cloud adoption. There is no going back.

Think about doing it yourself. You would need the following:

data center room or NOC;
generator that has to be tested and maintained;
battery backup - tested, maintained and environmentally sound;
servers, switches, routers, fiber-channel, power channels;
duplicate gear;
fire suppression system;
compliance certificates;
licensing for any software;
client software or apps for every O/S - mobile and desk;
Internet capacity for remote access;
redundant Internet pipe;
VPN or other security device with RADIUS for access authorization;
staff that knows how to handle all of this stuff, 24x7;
power usage;
air conditioning;

The CAPEX would be large (which is one reason buyers choose cloud) and the labor costs - hiring, retaining, training, benefits, etc. - would be high - and in some cases scarce. And despite the outlay of capital - human and otherwise - there is no guarantee that you can keep it up 99.99% of the time - which means about 1 hour of downtime per year.

I'm not defending the outages, just saying that this will be expected behavior, just like dropped cellphone calls and faxes that required three or more retries.

The Mobile Master Agent

2012-07-03T00:01:37Z

There is a lot of chatter in the Channel about Transactional agents being replaced by VAR's and Consultative Agents. I see Master Agents having to do a similar dance real soon.

Tech Data is one of the largest VAD (value added distributors) in the world. Most VAR's have an account with TD to buy hardware. The TDmobility division is a master agent for cellco services. Moreso than any master agency I know of.

Now Ingram, the other large VAD, just bought BrightPoint for $650M. 'BrightPoint distributes mobile phones and other wireless devices sold by companies such as Apple Inc, LG Electronics Inc and Nokia Oyj to customers, which include Sprint Nextel Corp, Vodafone Group Plc and RadioShack Corp." basically, BrightPoint is fulfillment - one of the big hurdles in the MVNO world.

Ingram is becoming a Cloud Aggregator and a Mobile Aggregator. Tech Data is a Master Agent for mobile, XO, some cloud and MDM. This might be where the transactional agents end up: as customers (or partners) of a VAD.

Cellular Mayhem

2012-05-18T17:46:16Z

Just looking at the news makes me think that the cellular industry is having a week of mayhem. Besides the mess I wrote about earlier this week, "US wholesale player LightSquared has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection amid efforts to resolve regulatory issues that have prevented it from launching its satellite service," according to Telecoms. "The carrier has been planning to build a ground-based LTE network, supported by satellites, but the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) blocked the project, stating that the proposed mobile broadband network will impact GPS services and that there is no practical way to mitigate the potential interference." That about spells it all out. Last I read Philip Falcone wants the FCC to give Lightsquared better spectrum.

WISPA stormed DC this week to plead at the FCC and Congress for more unlicensed spectrum. Everyone wants more spectrum, but only WISPA will settle for unlicensed spectrum. WISP's make a lot out of a little. Cellcos make a mess out of an abundance, which just goes to show that when you are too big to fail, you will fumble a lot.

Speaking of fumbling, AT&T is in talks with Leap Wireless. Yeah. AT&T needs to acquire more spectrum. How about you and all the rest of you just deploy the spectrum you already have? How about you have to give it back if it isn't lit in a year?

I like this comparison by the NYT: Sprint as a downer and AT&T Mobility as techno-Pollyanna. Sprint might be right about mobile payments, since I don't trust the cellcos enough to be my wallet. I have a wallet. A leather one. I trust AMEX. I understand the rules of using VISA. I have Paypal. What more do I need? Do I really need to spend my money faster?

The Big 4 Cellco execs riffed at CTIA. Yawn.

AT&T ripped into FCC Chair again and threatened price increases: "In the case of wireless, without additional capacity, which would have been created by our transaction, prices rise," said AT&T Senior Vice President Jim Cicconi." So you mismanage your network, can't buy your competition, whine about the FCC and then raise rates. Awesome! We have names for people like you.

You know I have a problem with Sprint and its CEO, but this headline takes the cake: A Better Network is Coming! Really? Could be get a worse network?

,p>T-Mobile thinks that VZ's deal with SpectrumCo (the cable alliance) is bad for everyone. "T-Mobile USA would like to have a chance to bid on the spectrum Verizon Wireless is looking to buy." Well, make a bid then. Sheesh.

The Union is against the VZW-Cable deal, "could mean the end of a competitive telecommunications landscape, saddling consumers with higher prices and diminished choice." Well, that and the Union doesn't get a piece of the deal. I do agree that this will end all competition, since the competition is a Duopoly. Now they would be working together.