If I was starting my telecom agency today, what would I do?

When I started in 1999, I was selling basically one product (Wholesale DSL to ISPs). That was my entry drug of choice. It led to frame relay, ATM, IP Transit, DS1/DS3 and PRIs. But it was a single offering to a very targeted market. Most of those clients from 1999-2001 are still with me!

Certainly an agent starting out is going to be offering bandwidth in all its colors. However, I would build a multi-vendor bundle to sell to a specific audience. I am a big fan of vertical sales. Anyone can be a Generalist, but being a Specialist pays better. How many GPs (general practitioners) are left in medicine or law?

And being a Specialist doesn’t mean that you have to turn away other business that comes to you, it just means that you have Focus. You have a target to aim at. You have an audience that you can get to know and develop a message for.

It is far easier to market a specific bundle aimed at a target vertical than it is to create a marketing message aimed at the generic masses.

Targeted marketing is cheaper. Easier to send email or postcards to every ISP in the BellSouth region than to target every SMB in a state.

One bundle I have been working on is the Verizon Wireless One Talk service with 4G backup, a Cradlepoint router, FiOS and a Square POS (point of sale) system. It is a targeted package – Retail. It allows for add-on sales: smartphones, video surveillance, email or Office365 and web hosting. You could also offer credit card processing and PCI DSS Compliance via EarthLink. You could go bigger with managed wi-fi. There are many add-ons, but the original 4 component bundle is where to start.

The bundle contains the essential ingredients of a small retail shop: broadband, backup (because retail can’t make money without 100% uptime on the Internet for credit card processing and digital phone service), wireless network, phone system and cash register. Signing up with SYNNEX and any of the Alliance Partners would get you all the access you need to bundle that – and make commissions.

Anyway that is how I would start today. Chasing Verticals with a multi-vendor solution that I designed for them.

Tags: agents, bundle, channel partners, retail, strategy
Related tags: multi vendor, bundle, target, targeted, today, retail

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The news out of small ILECs like TDS and Cincinnati Bell is that fiber to the home is selling well but more importantly is increasing retention and lowering churn. (Customer acquisition costs are very high in flat product segments like consumer broadband, cellular service and TV.)

Even Fairport, acquired by RLEC Consolidated, is upgrading its network for higher speeds. Some of this is due to the fact that cable is winning the broadband war. Some of it is powered by USF Reform whereby broadband is the metric for dollars. Add in the Connect America Funds (CAF) and other federal and state incentives for broadband and middle mile fiber deployment. AT&T, Verizon, Windstream and CenturyLink have all talked about upgrading the broadband infrastructure. (BTW, this flies in the face of the new FCC Chairman’s claims that investment went down after Title II.) It comes down to revenue – and DSL was not cutting it.

Fiber deployment is tough (just ask Google). Many providers use a mix of technologies. TPX (formerly known as TelePacific), Windstream, XO and Google Fiber use fixed wireless for broadband. Thousands of WISPs in America have been utilizing wireless to deliver broadband for years. The bigger guys are now jumping on the bandwagon. To be fair, the technology is not only better, but cheaper.

This : (from Sail Internet in Fremont California) “George Ginis used Mimosa’s super Wi-Fi to connect a customer a customer with 435.74 down, 331.83 up, and 4 ms ping. 5 GHz Mimosa is designed like a mmWave network but a heck of a lot cheaper than 28 GHz. Interesting alternative.”

DSL Prime has an ad from Sckipio about Virtual fiber. “Extend your fiber with 100-300 meters of single-port G.fast. It can save expensive trenching for cell towers, small cells, basement fiber, commercial customers and others. A very thin management layer allows operators to keep their existing GPON management layer. Sckipio makes it effortless to add G.fast to any GPON network.” G.fast uses copper like VDSL2. We’ll see if it gets adopted in the US like it is in Europe.

Also on the copper side is trials by ASSIA for Terabit DSL. See here. Companies are at work to extend the life of wireline broadband to satisfy the consumer appetite for downloading videos. On the business side, the same technologies will be used to feed the business appetite for cloud apps – fixed wireless, 4G/LTE-A/5G, DSL/T1, cable modem and fiber. SD-WAN will be layered on top for metrics, failover/resilience and more. Interesting times.

Tags: broadband, copper, dsl, fiber, rlec, wireless, wireline, wispa
Related tags: fixed wireless, fiber deployment, management layer, fiber, broadband, network

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Copper is Coming to an End – Oct 05, 2016

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BroadSoft Adds PaaS to Cloud Portfolio. Funny, I thought that BroadCloud was their version of PaaS. NoJitter blames this launch on the acquisition of VoIP Logic, a white-label customer that Broadsoft bought for $13M in 2016. As one BSFT client stated it, “BSFT will force every customer to be on their cloud platform at some point.” Yeah, it wasn’t what they signed up for but BSFT has to feed the Wall Street beast.

RC did have some wins last quarter: RC “closed six deals with TCV north of $1 million dollars up from five in Q4. One of these wins was at Hyatt Hotels Corporation. Hyatt will be replacing legacy Avaya system at their headquarters with RingCentral Office.”

Some factors that are shaking things up: Avaya bankruptcy; 8×8 and Shoretel hiring bankers for strategy; and Toshiba leaving the North American market.

RC states: “For each dollar invested in sales and marketing, we continue to see $9 of revenue and $7 of gross profit over the projected life of an Office customer. ” A number of UC providers should take note of that stat.

In the last 15 years, 52% of the S&P 500 have disappeared.

According to the CDC, “more than half of Americans have cut their traditional phone line and now only get wireless phone service.” The other half is paying more and more for POTS service.

Verizon sold its data centers. It also sold its cloud services unit to IBM .

CenturyLink sold its data centers to a coalition of PE firms that also bought a collection of cyber-security firms. The new company will go by the name Cyxtera Technologies and it will be run by the former CEO of Terremark.

Gary Testa left Polycom last March to become President of Star2Star. That lasted 11 months, then he quietly exited telecom. Michelle Accardi has his position now. I am guessing the IPO is on hold.

John Oliver took on the new FCC Chair (former VZ lawyer btw) and net neutrality again. Want to comment on the FCC proceeding ironically named Restoring Internet Freedom (Docket 17-108) head over to the domain www.gofccyourself.com

I tried to explain this to several security people. Thankfully now there is a study. “More than 70 percent of SMB IT managers say budget considerations have forced them to compromise on security features when purchasing endpoint security,” according to a survey by VIPRE.

All these Rapid Expansion press releases are funny. Yeah, you are following the Long Channel Strategy of signing up everyone you can. No idea how that pans out for most since it is a million dollar cash deal. Each of those master agencies will need co-marketing dollars just like the multitude of vendors that signed up with the likes of Jenne, Tech Data and other VADs. At some point, the cost to get a sale may be too high.

VZW has a co-sale model for One Talk. AT&T has co-selling. But RingCentral is taking this further. There is the partner, a channel manager and a SME from RC involved in each sale – from 1 seat to a million according to the release. All three getting 100% of commission. That will get expensive quick.

I would like to stop seeing ridiculous numbers in the press releases: “over 2,200 sales partners are now offering our services” and “we have more than 4,000 partners” and “300 Master Agents signed up” and the best: “8 Master Agents, providing 200,000 sub-agents”. STOP!

Tags: broadsoft, centurylink, cloud computing, data center, FCC, hosted pbx, ibm, net neutrality, security, smb, vz, vzw, wireline
Related tags: master agents, press releases, security, million, signed, customer

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From RC’s Channel head, Zane Long, “As organizations continue to migrate their IT infrastructures and applications to the cloud, I’ve noticed something interesting happening. Initially, the migration was driven by sales and marketing. Yes, some insightful IT and business managers saw the value proposition of the cloud early on–lower costs, the off-loading of hardware ownership and maintenance of equipment, automated software upgrades, responsibility for security, business continuity and more. Until recently, though, education and persuasion were required to give other organizations the confidence to take the leap.”

This year’s Data Center Industry Survey from Uptime Institute seems to indicate that “It is moving slower than I’d have thought.” That persuasion isn’t enough to make the transition happen faster.

The legacy premise PBX sales have slowed down but have not been surpassed by cloud PBX yet [source and HERE].

No one is crushing it despite more vendors entering the cloud space every day. Well, actually, Amazon is crushing it with S3 and AWS.

“Many people don’t seem to be willing to throw out their legacy systems but are still investing in diesel generators and backup power,” says Matt Stansberry, Uptime Institute’s Senior Director. Or they just can’t. I have seen way too many businesses – especially telcos and cablecos – relying on spreadsheets and faxes!!!

“One statistic thrown up by the 2017 survey has changed very little over the last four years:

• 65% of organizations deploy their IT assets in an enterprise-owned data center.
• 22% use a colocation or multi-tenant data center provider
• only 13 percent

have moved their assets to the cloud.

“It is probably because it’s not easy to re-architect their legacy applications for a cloud environment.” That is true. And not all software can port off AS400s and other legacy server boxes. In fact, COBOL Programmers are STILL in demand!

The providers only hear about clients that want to migrate or are thinking about cloud. Partners see businesses every day that will not be changing anything.

It appears we will be dragging businesses to the cloud kicking and screaming.

Heck look how many businesses are still on TDM (POTS) and use faxes.

Tags: cloud communications, cloud computing, collocation, data center, pbx
Related tags: uptime institute, cloud, businesses, legacy, still, organizations

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