At The CPZ, the rest of the panel were cloud guys (VAR's and Hosted UC). This is a snippet of the conversation where the panel is talking about how transactional telecom sales are dead, long live the Cloud!

People deemed LD dead years ago (like when MCI went BK), too, but there are still a large number of agents and resellers making money on LD and pre-paid calling cards.

Until TDM is retired, agents will still be selling POTS, DSL and T1 - and making a living doing so.

Here's the problem with selling Cloud (other than the fact that cloud providers keep screwing commissions to agents):

The sales process is different! Selling replacement telecom services is not the same as selling managed services (like cloud and IT). How different? The conversation, script, questions and prospecting for IT is distinct. The buyers may not be the same. Sales triggers are dissimilar. It requires sales and product training.

I worked for a Novell VAR from 1996-1999. The sales trigger was when something broke. In telecom, the sales trigger is usually the end of the contract, because the penalties for leaving early are huge. Other sales triggers for telecom: expansion, moving, or a shift in IT (i.e., more bandwidth needed because of VoIP, Citrix or backup).

Dave makes a point about "do you want to be in that cheap stuff or do you want to do good by your customer". Do agents want to be in "the cheap stuff"? No. Our commissions are based on MRR. We would like it to be as high as possible. However, we don't make the prices, the carriers do, so why blame the sales force?

In some cases - like government agencies -- the prospect is looking to reduce the telecom spend due to budget constraints. If I don't do it, someone will.

Back to being mad about the prices falling.

Agents didn't commodize telecom, CLEC's did. It started with the LD penny wars and has continued every since. In 1999, when Covad, Rhythms and Northpoint all IPO'ed, all selling DSL nationwide against each other without any differentiation. DSL (broadband) created pricing pressure on the T1 business, which continues to erode. Moreover, the Integrated T1 became a commodity long ago, again due to a lack of CLEC differentiation (branding and marketing). SIP trunking came along as a "cheaper" alternative to a PRI. See how that goes? Today, we have $200 Covad T1's and $2 per MB Cogent bandwidth adding to the price compression. So who's fault is it? (I won't even get into the companies that went through BK and really screwed up telecom with that arbitrage mindset or the fact that even as revenue diminishes debt is increasing.)

When you look at the Hosted VoIP space, there isn't a whole lot of differentiation either. There are so many players, it is confusing to the buyers and sellers. It doesn't help that so many of them don't know what they want to be or who they want to target. Wholesale, white-label, retail - whatever! Just sell something!

In the video, I make a point that no sales person is going to walk away from revenue. Well, most carriers don't walk away from revenue either - even bad revenue (no margin revenue).

Let me give you an example, there is a Hosted UC shop that really only wants UC customers, but doesn't really say that to its Channel. When an Agent brings them "small" hosted PBX deals, it is frown upon -- but they don't say No (to the revenue).

If the carrier doesn't have a target market - like AboveNet and Smoothstone do - then it is selling against everyone everywhere. That's just stupid. Service Providers need to start thinking like fiber and cablecos: ON-Net is Good. Type II is bad.

As we get into Cloud services, we are talking bloody red ocean - everyone and their brother is a player: web hosts, data centers, MSP, VAR, telcos, cablecos, CLEC, ITSP. Yeah, that will make it easy to sell. How would an agent even do a competitive analysis?

If you want an Agent to sell your stuff, answer these questions:

If you can't answer these questions (or want to give me BS answers), this is your problem!

On a LinkedIn group we are discussing SLA (service level agreements) and how they do not represent uptime. If you need uptime, you need redundancy. You need to build a resilient network. Netwolves has a solution called Bonded Broadband. "NetWolves consolidates the best carriers through their Bonded Broadband product by combining four circuits of diverse types from different carriers. It supports DSL, Cable, Fixed Wireless and VSAT (and even a T-1, etc.) simultaneously. It will to operate, though at lower speed, even when it loses one of the underlying circuits. It provides a level of high availability with diversity that is unique and valuable. Bonded Broadband always includes 1 static IP for the virtual circuit."

Conferencing is a different kind of sale. It's good that InterCall has added some scripting into their FAQ. By that I mean, by provided answers to questions that come up in sales meetings, like "The majority of our meetings are audio only, how can Unified Meeting add value to those meetings?" More companies should do that.

Aastra IP phones are not widely supported by Broadsoft based VoIP providers. Aastra gets a lift since Metaswitch based EarthLink selected 6700i SIP phones for EarthLink Complete™ (hosted VoIP service).

Analysts are raving about Rogers Communications in Canada launching One Number by utilizing Counterpath's Bria softphone. Now the customer has one number on any platform - PC, Mac, mobile, etc. Rogers mentions IMS, that long ago over-hyped architecture that was supposed to solve the telecom world's many problems, as the underlying network piece. The other is the Bria software, which presents an almost Google Voice like service. "Rogers, however, isn't simply re-branding the Bria Android and iPhone clients. It's doing something far more sophisticated. It's using the underlying Bria technology to power a web-based portal that can make and receive phone calls and send text messages to any Canadian number as well as video chat with other Rogers One Number users - all at no charge and with no penalty to a customer's voice minute or SMS caps," writes GigaOM. Jon Arnold has a good look at the service on his blog too, including a post about the beta launch.

AT&T partnered with VMware to launch AT&T's "Virtual Private Cloud". I have a blog coming up about telcos and Cloud. Watch for it this week.

New to the American market but not new to the global telecom industry, One Access

They make CPE for CLEC on multi-access platforms.

Looking for a white-label VoIP company? Flat Planet Phone Company is looking for a few select partners that want to own a VoIP business and the healthy (40%) margins that come with it.

I get press releases because PR folks like to make me annoyed daily. What really gets me is how many make outrageous claims like free calls and no more cell charges: "Zipring works with every phone and turns any smartphone into a free or cheap calling phone. It supports all SIP-enabled devices and does not handcuff users to Zipring software. It also turns any iPod Touch into a smart phone."

Carbonite has some cool new ads to sell online backup [from Adweek]

XO Communications Inc. launched a three-year strategic plan in 2012 that involves streamlining its product offering, including eliminating most TDM services.

The FCC has a lot on its plate and wants to close some dockets. FCC's Genachowski Tells Congress He Will Consider Closing Title II Docket, which proposed to reclassify Internet access service as a telecommunications service subject common carrier regulations.

I emailed my list this post from L3 this morning. How Kodak is just like POTS.

Over and over, I am hearing that Verizon has given up on copper. From repair issues to DSL to stripping copper out when FiOS is installed, the story seems to point to VZ looking to forget its copper plant.

in a discussion on LinkedIn about SLA's, one agent had this to say, "The absolute WORST cases I have seen have all been in the northeast where Verizon's copper is concerned. Verizon seems to have made the decision to put all efforts and funds behind their fiber build out (a good thing) but have completely sacrificed the quality behind their copper services such as T1. If your copper T1 goes down in New York, you might has well throw your hands up in prayer, because that's the only thing that will get it fixed."

Another commenter wrote, "Verizon in some places is actively ripping up copper as they lay fiber because they are not required to resell fiber to CLECs and ISPs at wholesale rates." This has been widely reported, because VZ doesn't want the expense of running to networks - copper and fiber. Plus the fiber doesn't have to be shared and the copper does. The copper means competition. Fiber means they just have to worry about cablecos, who quite frankly are kicking their butt.

Wholesale used to be a healthy business for ILEC's. Today, neither cablecos nor ILEC's want to wholesale anything. In fact, clients of mine in VZ regions have a lot of issues.

For example, "We had an outage about 3 weeks ago that lasted more than three days. This also affected [another local ISP] as I spoke him last night about the current outage. We [both have] a bunch [of customers still] out of service as well. They have been out of service since Monday. The last outage caused an exodus of customers and this one will do the same. Our guys have put in tickets, called to escalate many times. .... no one at VZ will listen. Ever. They simply close the tickets that we open."

It's a systemic problem - widespread - from the C-Suite down - the story has been that every company -- even wholesale customers - are the enemy and the Union and on-union workers must do everything they can to make it uncomfortable unless you are a direct VZ customer.

We have the case of a BK CLEC who had recorded conversations with VZ employees soliciting a customer who was down saying that it wouldn't happen if they were with VZ. [This has been a problem with both RBOC's since I got into telecom in 1999.]

Verizon faces up to $400,000 in fines after New York's Public Service Commission accused the company of not making service repairs in a timely fashion.

What do you do when the RBOC doesn't want to wholesale, doesn't want to repair, and just looks at the bottom line and the few metrics that Wall Street analysts can understand??

Many states don't even regulate the ILEC any more, so what do they do? It becomes the job of the FTC, the FCC and the court system. Talk about a deck stacked against the customer!

When our underlying telecommunications structure suffers, so too does our economic growth.

here's 2 problems with a fiber only strategy for an ILEC:

One, fiber goes out with power, so no 911 or dial-tone when the lights go out.

Two, the installation period for fiber is wicked long. Copper can be installed within two weeks. Fiber takes months. That hurts businesses. I have one moving in 3 weeks and to get 20MB of bandwidth he has to wait months. That won't work.

Ever think that just nothing in this country makes sense any more?

In the discussion about SLA's, the conclusion is to convince your clients to buy redundancy: 2 pipes. That's nice in theory but not in reality. The thing is that you have to set the expectation that if Internet or VoIP is integral to their business operations, no SLA is going to save them, redundancy and business continuity planning will. Otherwise, an outage will be a disaster that they have not planned for. It is not IF, it is WHEN.