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

wireless

Is All Broadband Going Metered?

December 5, 2011

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.

Well That Was Unsatisfying

December 2, 2011

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.

Cell Phones Offer No Privacy

November 30, 2011

Beyond the fact that radio frequencies can be listened to with Radio Shack parts - I'm not even talking NSA spycraft here - two reports out this week show that malware is present and accounted for on cell phones. Awesome, right? I mean, how long did that even take?

One article details how the IEEE has found that as many as 2000 free smartphone apps carry malware.

A Bad Day for AT&T

November 30, 2011

The FCC released its order today declaring that the AT&T-T-Mobile merger was not good for consumer, public good or competition. And AT&T was not pleased that the FCC released the Staff Analysis - all 157 pages of it.

AT&T probably didn't like Commissioner Copps blasting them for wasting serious staff hours and expense analyzing this transaction over the last 7 months.

The findings - in summary - are as follows:

Frontier Gets Cell Service, Agents Should Too

November 18, 2011

Frontier Communications has inked a deal to be a channel sales agent for AT&T for voice and data cellular plans, as reported by the Fool. "This was a natural extension of a product that we are not currently offering that would fit well with our product suite," Steve Crosby, Frontier's senior vice president of government affairs and public relations. At least they realize that cellular is an important part of the total telecom send. Do you?

There's No Spectrum Shortage

October 31, 2011

"US mobile networks currently have access to 538Mhz of radio spectrum -- with a further 300Mhz due to be made available -- but only 192Mhz is currently being used, according to an analyst note from Citi Investment Research & Analysis," from an article on Cellular News.

from Blough Turner's blog.

It kind of destroys (yet again) the argument of AT&T for buying T-Mobile. These carriers have the spectrum, which they have either NOT DEPLOYED or, as AT&T was polite as to tell Congress, have mismanaged what they have deployed.

It's Monday So Lots Happened

October 17, 2011

Polycom bought Vivu, a video collaboration company, to help Polycom push it's Presence gear. Video, video, video. Yet I never have video calls or video call requests. To me, I wish you would work on the phone part.

How Do You Make it Rain in the Cloud?

October 10, 2011

Here at Microcorp's One-on-One event, I moderated a panel this morning about various cloud services with Level3 (CDN), Cbeyond (Virtual Servers), Intercall (Microsoft 365/Linc), EarthLink (Security), and PAETEC (Visual Messaging). It's an eclectic mix, but that should tell you that there are many ways to leverage this thing called CLOUD to make money.

The Cloud is really a value for IT services. It's about leveraging the technology and the technical skill set of another company in order to let the business focus on their own finctionality, instead of the tech that might help the business operate.

The move to the Cloud by carriers is due to the lack of margin growth in the primary business of access. It's moving up the OSI stack from Layer 1 (wireless, copper, fiber) to Layer 3 (Internet) to Layer 7 (Apps).



MVNO and Name Changes

October 3, 2011

Here at COMPTEL there have been some announcements. The big one is that Sprint has signed up two new MVNO's - XO and Easton Telecom. Easton Telecom is a reseller CLEC that has contracts with 100+ carriers (according to its PR). The interesting move comes from XO whose interim CEO inked an MVNO deal with Sprint.

Tech Data Becomes a Master

September 19, 2011

Tech Data announced a joint venture with Brightstar called ActivateIT, branded as TDMobility. In this case, TD will become a master agent for its VARs to offer not just cellular service from the likes of Sprint, ATT and T-Mobile, but M2M, devices and the works.

It will be interesting to see how TD transforms from hardware distributor, which has a very different financial model, to a cloud provider and a master agent.

The Master Agent has to deal with telcos. Cellcos are notorious for commission issues, moreso than other carriers.



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