There are a bunch of things that I want to comment on but just don't have the time. Yet they may be of interest to you. I did get to comment on the FCC's net neutrality ruling and the Cbeyond-Birch merger.
For one thing, I hope that the CBEY-Birch deal doesn't become the Fairpoint-VZ deal. Too big to swallow. The reason I think that is (one) because all other deals for Birch were just asset purchases; and (two) L3-GC, WIND-Paetec, SBC-ATT -- Integration Troubles Galore.
West IP is using the white board video platform to explain the basics of SIP Trunking.
The Challenge of Providing Landline Service When Returns Diminish. The smaller LECs are hurting more than the top 5 ILECs (ATT, VZ, C-Link, Frontier, Fairpoint). Even ILECs like WIND, CinBell and TDS have offset landline losses with data center or cloud (or both). For the RBOCs, getting rid of landlines is to mitigate union and pension responsibilities, not because maintaining copper is too expensive. AT&T uses copper for last mile for U-Verse, their VDSL2 service.
DISH Network is still looking to become a cellco player. The new plan involves DISH working with a startup called Artemis on pCell, a protocol to replace LTE and speed up cellular data networks. It's a risk but that's what will be needed for innovation.
Microcorp adds another vendor, RapidScale. Master Agencies seem to be signing up a lot of vendors 9especially cloud providers) these days. CNSG added Bright House Networks (cableco).
Amdocs found (in a survey of 1,311 global SMBs) that 66% of SMBs found that cloud services are very important to their businesses, while 57% said their businesses are already making use of cloud-based services, like data backup. SMBs use on average 3 cloud vendors.
Most telling: 74% of respondents said they prefer to receive cloud-based services from their primary service provider, but 41% believe they can get better deals from independent cloud vendors." Also, "80% of respondents said they want to receive one bill for all the communication services they consume."
