Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

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3 Reasons I Get a Rash from my Industry

August 23, 2010

Actually, I don't get a rash from the Industry but from a large portion of the people in my Industry.

There are so many changes happening right now - every where. Our Industry is experiencing so many factors: declining prices, hyper-competition, anti-competitive actions, forbearance, Net Neutrality, and so much more.

Agents are locked in their business model and don't want to step outside the comfort zone.

Debt and Finances

August 16, 2010

I'll readily admit that I am not a financial wizard. I am risk adverse and think that playing the stock market is like a casino (the deck is stacked against you). Then I read The Big Short by Michael Lewis and I was amazed that most of the Players on The Street don't know more than me, except they know when the rats are bailing a ship, so they can too.

That being said, I wonder how we have developed such an over leveraged Industry.

An Interview With Level3

August 11, 2010

As a founding member of the Technology Channel Association, I get to interface with some of the channel execs. One that I have a lot of respect for is Craig Schlagbaum, VP Indirect Channels, Level 3. Craig let me interview him about changes in the channel.

1.

Do You Compete With Your Channel Manager?

August 10, 2010

Lately, I have been seeing some crazy things out of Channel Managers. Do they not understand that everything comes out since we operate in a small world?

I have seen this twice this month, where someone is a channel manager for a VoIP Provider and also runs a VoIP Provider. You read that correctly.

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?

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.

Not Exactly the Way to Sell SIP

July 20, 2010

XO announced a SIP Savings Estimator Tool in order to help sell their SIP offerings. I understand why they do this: Bell-heads only know how to sell on price.

In my head, why bother? Just keep selling PRI - SIP to the customer premise then PRI signaling into the box. It's what all the CLEC's are doing.

So How is VoIP Doing?

July 8, 2010

Two Mergers

July 7, 2010

Two resellers merged: GLOBALINX Purchases TMC for 'Robust' Agent Channel. GLOBALINX is an IP reseller. TMC is a TDM reseller. Should be interesting to see how the Bell-heads work with the Net-heads, since the thinking is way different (and so is the approach to sales).

Zayo Buys AFS

July 1, 2010

As Rob Powell predicted, the self-proclaimed Fiber Bigot, Dave Rusin, CEO of Rochester-based American Fiber Systems, sold the company to Zayo. Some reports were that the sale price was $185M, but Zayo is stating that number is ridiculous. The original press release did not offer a price tag. 

Consider that Zayo financed $250M in debt at 10.25% in April. It's AGL acuisition is still pending. Zayo has a capital intensive business (building out fiber always is). And it's a VC backed company. Zayo smacks of a roll-up waiting for the right time to resell.

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