Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter

On Rad's Radar?

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

April 2011

You are browsing the archive for April 2011.

It's Getting Out of Hand

April 29, 2011

Posted in apps, privacy
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CenturyLink Buys Savvis

April 27, 2011

It hasn't even finished swallowing Qwest and CenturyLink makes a deal to buy Savvis for $2.5B plus the assumption of $700M in debt. From the press release, "With the addition of Savvis, CenturyLink will achieve global scale as a managed hosting and colocation provider and will accelerate its ability to deliver quality managed hosting and cloud capabilities to its business customers. The combination of CenturyLink's hosting and network assets with Savvis' proven solutions in colocation, managed hosting and cloud services substantially enhances CenturyLink's capabilities and provides the company with a solid platform for future growth." So they want to be global?

"Together, CenturyLink and Savvis will operate 48 data centers located in North America, Europe, and Asia with more than 1.9 million square feet of gross floor space; a robust, national 207,000 route mile fiber network; a 190,000 mile global access network; and have a customer list that includes a majority of the Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies."

Everyone is chasing cloud and global. It's interesting because while there are 1000 companies in the Fortune 1000, there are over 5 million other businesses who are looking for business services.



Posted in cellular, cloud computing, colocation, data center, mergers, telco
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A Message for Dan Hesse

April 26, 2011

The merger of AT&T and T-Mobile will likely have extreme anti-competitive effects on the mobile industry. Certainly, the DOJ and the two F-Agencies (FTC and FCC) need to take note that mobile is churning the service economy of America right now and this merger could derail that. That being said, I have this to say to the CEO of Sprint, Dan Hesse:

You have lawyers and lobbyists and SVP's. Let them carry this fight for you.

Posted in FCC, FTC, apps, cableco, cellular, mergers, mpls, spectrum, technology, wi-fi, wireless
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VoIP Security Best Practices

April 21, 2011

There has been much talk lately about VoIP security.

The FCC has a page to warn consumers and businesses alike about Voicemail hacks. (The FCC calls it Voice Mail Fraud but it's really about hacking the voicemail system to enable toll fraud.) This actually happened to me a few weeks ago. I never go into my vmail system because I get all my vmail as email.

Posted in PBX, compliance, security, training, voip
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The Inexpensive Cloud

April 21, 2011

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Amazon Web Services including EC2 is down today. When Gmail has any failure my twitter stream goes nuts. Facebook collapses often.

There is one thing people should keep in mind: Building Resiliency and Survivability into a Cloud Platform is not cheap.

For Agents, used to selling TDM with five nines reliability, moving to VoIP with less than that will be a shock, especially when they find out after the first outage.

For VAR's, who have been running their own servers, and like visitors to  Vegas who tell me they are up money, will tell you about never having any down time, moving customers to the Cloud, where you lack control and transparency, will be unsettling.





Posted in VAR, Web 2.0, agents, apps, cloud computing, data center, disaster recovery, outage, saas, technology, training, voip
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Satellite Wants FCC Funds

April 20, 2011

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Of course. Why shouldn't another bunch of billion dollar companies ask the federal government for money. From the Benton Foundation: "A group of satellite broadband providers -- Dish Network, EchoStar Technologies, ViaSat/Wildblue Communications and Hughes Network Systems -- told the Federal Communications Commission that they should be allowed to participate in the Connect America Fund."

What's ironic is that Hughes Communications, the holding company that operates Hughes Network Systems, was purchased by Echostar in February. Echostar owns DISH Network.

Posted in FCC, broadband, satellite
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Smoothstone Gets Bought

April 20, 2011

Consolidation continues in the Hosted VoIP space as West Corporation, which owns Intercall, Intrado and other businesses, acquired Smoothstone today for $120M. This is on the heels of InterCall, a subsidiary of West Corporation and the world's largest conferencing and collaboration services provider, acquiring Preferred One Stop Technologies Limited ("POSTcti"), a leading provider of components, systems, professional services and hosted services for Unified Communications ("UC") in Europe on February 1st. [POSTcti provides Unifiied Desktop primarily].

This certainly helps West to become a big player in the Hosted UC space globally. SmoothStone expanded into Europe back in November (on the MPLS network of Masergy).

Posted in PBX, cloud computing, communications, hosted uc, mergers, mpls, unified communications, voip
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Grasshopper Co-Founder Talks Entrepreneurs

April 18, 2011

Posted in Marketing, PBX, smb, technology, voip
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Starview Talks Prism

April 16, 2011

Posted in sip trunking, technology, telecommunications, voip
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Rulings on VoIP All Over the Place

April 13, 2011

So we have a ruling against MagicJack and Ymax that AT&T won that supposedly will just require some tariff changes for MagicJack to be back in the game - collecting its $5M.  There was also a VoIP traffic ruling against PAETEC in favor of CommPartners that basically said that an all-VoIP stream was not subject to access fees, which might be the same ruling in this case.

The FCC held a meeting about Inter-Carrier Comp last week. No ruling or order followed. Why would it?

Posted in FCC, sip trunking, telco, voip
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There's a New Sheriff in Town

April 11, 2011

Posted in agents, channel
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Call Us Customer Experience

April 11, 2011

Posted in apps, cloud computing, hosted uc, telecommunications, unified communications, voip
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Cellular Mergers

April 11, 2011

Posted in FCC, cellular, mergers
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VZ One Year

April 11, 2011

Posted in agents, channel, commissions
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It Finally Happened

April 11, 2011

Level3 finally buys Global Crossing for $3B including assuming $1.1B in GC debt.

This is a merger that the industry has expected for some time. Honestly, I don't see how it works, because it's about synergies. My favorite word, because it means we will fire a lot of people with overlapping job titles, but not overlapping knowledge.

Posted in channel, mergers
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Some Good Books

April 10, 2011

I like to read mysteries to give my brain a rest. My favorite writers include Barry Eisler, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, Randy Wayne White, Jack Higgins, Eric Van Lustbader, Robert Parker (passed away), Stephen Cannell (passed away), Michael Connelly, and Steven Brust.

The rest of the time I am reading blogs, articles, magazines, analysis, SEC filings and business books and writing.

Here are books I thought were good:

  • Crush It or Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk;
  • Referral Engine by the Duct Tap edude, John Jantsch; 
  • Poke the Box by Seth Godin via the Domino Project (ebook or mp3 only);
  • Hub Mentality by Carl Woolston (thanks Greg Nielsen!);
  • Evil Plans by Hugh MacLeod is AWESOME.
Posted in books
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A Failure to Communicate

April 6, 2011

In the Agent space, many non-telco vendors (like Conferencing and Hosted PBX providers) have tried to get traction. Sales traction from this independent sales force. It isn't going well.

Agents (and VAR's) spend about 80-99% of the work week in the comfort zone. That is, doing what they have always done.

Posted in Marketing, VAR, agents, backup, cellular, channel, cloud computing, commissions, conferencing, hosted uc, saas, sales and selling, smb, unified communications, xo
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DISHing Up a Blockbuster

April 6, 2011

DISH Networks has bought Blockbuster video from bankruptcy for a bid of $320M, according to USA Today. DISH with 14 million satellite TV subscribers has rolled out Google TV enhancements and TV Everywhere, including on Android tablets. This purchase, if the BK Court approves it, might give DISH brick-and-mortar stores to sell more DISH services and Slingboxes.

This is the second asset purchase for DISH as they bought DBSD North America, Inc., a hybrid satellite and terrestrial communications company, for approximately $1 billion in February.

Posted in mergers, satellite, video
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One Quick Note About Cloud

April 5, 2011

I keep reading all these projections for Cloud and I have to wonder: Has everyone forgotten that a good portion of this used to be Hosting? Shared Hosting; Managed Hosting; Dedicated Server; Collocation; Digital Hands. This isn't new. Plus it isn't like RackSpace doesn't door knock to see if a business has a server to move to their data center.

Posted in cloud computing, conferencing, saas, technology, tele-presence, unified communications
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Advice for College Students

April 4, 2011

Saturday I was at the University of Tampa for the Southeast Entrepreneur Conference, where college students came together to pitch business ideas and to listen to some great speakers -- young ones who now only started businesses but were, to use Gary Vee's phrase, Crushing It!

Jonathan Kay is the Ambassador of Buzz for Grasshopper Group, a company that provides virtual PBX to small businesses plus other services like Chargify. He spoke about The Path to Entrepreneurship, by which he means go work for an entrepreneurial company before you launch your own just to get some knowledge and experience. Jonathan then presented at lunch for 10 minutes on Getting Started.

Posted in sales and selling
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VARs are Replacing Agents

April 3, 2011

In an article in Channel Partners magazine, Master Agents discuss how all their future growth will come from VAR's. Carriers are chasing VAR's for any growth in Channel numbers. Where does that leave the Agents?

Well, Agents can partner with VAR's to be the telecom provisioning department. Or Agents can start getting uncomfortable or irrelevant.

Exam the fact that most Agents do not want to sell cellular.



Posted in Internet, PBX, TCA, VAR, agents, apps, broadband, cableco, cellular, channel, cloud computing, commissions, conferences, sales and selling, sip trunking, training, voip
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Security VoIP and Otherwise

April 2, 2011

There are certainly security risks with VoIP. (And we will get to that). But let us not forget that TDM voice is easy to hack too. A pair of alligator clips and people can dial from your line or listen in.

Posted in security, voip, wi-fi, wireline
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5 Reasons I Skipped CTIA

April 1, 2011

The CTIA Show was in Orlando. I was going to go. I had an Expo pass and I was heading to Orlando to speak at the CLEC Summit anyway. But I didn't go.

Posted in cellular, wireless

agents apps att broadband broadsoft cable cableco cellular channel partners clec cloud communications cloud computing commissions data center FCC fcc fiber financials hosted pbx internet itexpo marketing master agency mergers politics sales security sellecom selling strategy TCA telecom is broken UC unified messaging VAR voip vz vzw wireless wireline

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