AstroTel, a Sarasota, FL based CLEC,sued Verizon for anti-trust in March this year (2011). Apparently, this case is going as well as its management predicted, because AstroTel just announced:

“AstroTel has entered into a definitive agreement with Birch Communications, Inc for Birch to acquire AstroTel’s operating assets, including our state-wide Florida network. You’ll be receiving a formal announcement in the coming months from the two companies as we progress with regulatory approvals. …. Both companies are committed to ensuring a smooth transition for our subscribers, and going forward you can count on the same level of professional, reliable service from Birch that you’ve come to expect from AstroTel.”

As an agent for AstroTel, I have to wonder about my commissions. Also, have to wonder about the SmartFax service: will it continue? I guess I’ll have to wait and see for answers in 2012.

One of my coaching clients asked me how to dig deep into a service providers knowledge base to insure that they can actually deliver on what they say. I had to chuckle.

In most cases, only a few people at any service provider really know what is under the hood in any detail.  Two examples for you follow.

I ordered a PRI from a CLEC. I asked numerous times if it was TDM PRI or not. The Channel Manager reassured me that it was a PRI. Finally, when I received the FOC date, I asked once more: Was this a true TDM PRI or was this PRI signaling at the CPE. It turns out that it was PRI signaling from the CPE and a SIP Trunk back to the CLEC. BAM! Cancel the order. Start over.

In the another case, the Agent is trying to determine if the Cisco 7900 phones can be used when the customer migrates to another Hosted PBX provider. A couple of ITSP’s have said YES; a couple have said NO. It made the Agent insecure in proposing a solution since he couldn’t get a straight answer. [Cisco 7900 were running MGCP, while most ITSP’s run SIP.]

The problem is that everyone is only looking at Quota and getting the contract signed. Our industry is sliding away from the Customer Matters.
What good is it to get the contract signed only to not be able to deliver on service?

That’s a lot of wasted manpower plus hard costs for anything ordered from the ILEC. Not to mention, you burn the Agent and the Customer.

Not many CLEC’s worry about branding, but most of the Branding occurs closest to the customer, where WOM (word-of-mouth) and relationships occur. If you give incorrect information, if you lie, if you don’t care if the information is accurate, you are ruining 3 brands: the CLEC, the Agent and YOUR OWN. 

One way to avoid this is to limit the number of carriers you deal with. It’s a challenge to know anything in-depth about 20 carriers, let allow 40 or 100. And in the ITSP sector, I think you need to take a regional approach. You want to be selling someone as close to the customer as possible for QOS and other reasons.

At the end of the day, you may make mistakes due to bad information. All you can do is give your customer the best choices you can and be as transparent as possible. When the mistake happens, apologize, work to fix it fast and give the customer Plan B. 

AT&T had to give up the acquisition of T-Mobile.

LightSquared is almost out of money, says Reuters. 

Clearwire needs money – not only to build out the two 4G networks it has promised to Sprint (WIMAX and LTE), but to continue operating.

VZW has been quietly buying up all the AWS and other spectrum it can get, which – if it gets through the DOJ and the FCC – would be devastating to everyone but VZW. If the cablecos actually start bundling VZW with their triple-play, as Forbes is betting, Clearwire – and subsequently Sprint – could be in trouble. 

The top 4 cablecos account for most of the consumer broadband and a huge swash of the US. Partnering with VZW – which seems so weird to me – means that

Sprint has MVNO deals with Cbeyond, TelePacific and XO. It used to have a deal with Pivot, a cable consortium. (I think EarthLink is also with Sprint.) It needs more. It needs CenturyLink and Windstream to be an MVNO customer. So does T-Mobile.

At this point, LightSquared has other issues besides money; they have GPS interference issues to deal with.

Clearwire just needs money to build and run. It needs customers who sign on for a minimum buy. T-Mobile could be one of them. So could WIND and C-Link.

Meanwhile, DISH is quietly fiddling with its spectrum plans. No idea what they will do.  But except for VZW, right now, 4G in the US is a mess, which directly impacts our economy. 

In recent weeks, AT&T has been hit with a blizzard of bad news.

It’s 3Q2011 earnings were off estimates. It’s merger with T-Mobile is looking less and less likely with the FCC report, its own smoking gun and the DOJ trial. It received horrible ratings for customer service – again. It was caught up in the CarrierIQ rootkit mess. 

The only good news was that it was able to buy the Qualcomm spectrum. This purchase won’t solve many of its issues but it will give the network some breathing room. (Unless the same engineers who admittedly mismanaged the wireless network before are still at work at Ma Bell.) 

Today, a notice was released that AT&T Southeast has exhausted its VLAN numbers in Atlanta and South Florida LATA’s for Metro Ethernet. It’s utterly mind boggling to me. Would you let AT&T manage your network? 

IN other news, VZW scooped up even more AWS spectrum from Cox for $315M. It looks like VZW has sales agent agreements in place with 4 MSO’s now – Bright House, Cox, Comcast and TW Cable. Can you say leaving my competition in the dust?

While AT&T was mired down with the merger – and Sprint was stumbling over that same merger – VZW has been taking the necessary steps to win the cellular race. Will Sprint or AT&T be able to catch up? 

Here’s my take on the Top 11 stories in telecom of 2011.

1. Shane McNamara being named VP of the Indirect Channel at XO. It was a shock pick for many in the industry.

2. TNCI Bankruptcy! I understand that the reseller model has been taking a huge beating in the last 3 years, but when you start off hawking “Agent Equity”, you need to be better fudiciary stewarts than this.

3. WIND-PAETEC merger – I just didn’t see that one coming. It did prove my point about the difference in running a private company as opposed to a public one, who is a slave to Wall Street.

4. Qwest getting bought by CenturyLink – and then CL buying Savvis. It was a big shopping spree. I thought it would have been wiser to buy a cell company, but CL is going all-in on the Cloud.

5. The TCA’s Certification program. This is kind of self-promoting because I am a Board member and founder of TCA, but I have seen how the carriers are looking at certification for the indirect channel. I think for agents the CTP (or some certification) will be necessary.

6. The Cloud M&A – there was so much of it! The big one was VZ buying Terremark, which might have been the same plan that CenturyLink used when scooping up Qwest CyberCenters and Savvis. I think the one least spoken about is the TWC-Navisite deal.

7. InterNAP killing its Channel. I don’t think this story is over, since the agents have to keep fighting this one or risk more crap like this from carriers who need to rightside their balance sheet like some kind of lipstick on a pig. Cloud companies don’t want to see it, but it is this action by InterNAP (and Equinix with Switch & Data before it) that keeps Agents from running to the Cloud. Fear of being cut off at the knees. Not that telcos – remember MCI? – haven’t sliced the channel (hello RBOCs!)

8. TelePacific’s buying spree – Telekenex, Tel-West, Covad Wireless, and Orange County Internet Xchange. It was fast and furious and quick.

9. Dan Foster leaving then returning to MegaPath to take over for Bruce Chatterly as President of the Business Markets Group. That game of musical chairs was confusing to watch, coming on the heels of the merger of Covad’s two largest customers – Megapath and Speakeasy – into one company.

10. Since 2011 seemed like the year of serial acquisitions from companies – Megapath, TelePacific, CenturyLink, Windstream, TDS – let’s give a hand to EarthLink, who took New Edge Networks and combined it with One Comm., DeltaCom, and STS Telecom to make a nationwide business CLEC play, then added a bunch of IT/Managed services/Cloud services to that CLEC with Logical Solutions, Business Vitals and the Synergy Global Solutions deals. We’ll see how that integration works out in 2012.

11. Comcast hiring Craig Schlagbaum to build and run its Channel indicated that Cable was coming to play in the business space. CLEC’s need to take note, because most CLEC“s don’t OWN or operate their own network, but lease network from ILEC’s and Cablecos. Also, Cox and Comcast are rolling out Hosted PBX nationwide, which means the ITSP space better wake up and get its house in order, since cable has a brand and a network to go with that Hosted PBX service.

I’m certain we will see more M&A in 2012 since companies are flush with cash and can’t organically increase revenue. And I am also certain that Cable will be making a big impact in the SMB space in 2012, much to the detriment of CLEC’s and VoIP providers.