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Showing posts with the label provisioning

The Deadly Mistakes That Wholesale Subsea Cable Providers Make: Part 2

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 4. The star-shaped organization model defines each department by function such as sales, provisioning, procurement, network operations and the like and has it directly report to the COO or CEO. Each department has a large degree of autonomy and independence which encourages kingdom building and departmental bickering.  We improve cooperation by recognizing that accountability requires some departments be subordinate to others. For example, procurement falls into two categories: backbone and the customer driven requests where a third party component like a long haul circuit, metro dark fibre pair or a local loop is required. Third party sourcing for customer driven requests should in the sales department. I know salesmen at one European carrier that source their own off-net requirements because procurement takes to 2 to 6 weeks to do it. Once a verbal yes is received, the salesman then points procurement to the third party offer. If sales determined the compensation and perfor...

The Woeful State of the Wholesale Telecommunications Industry - Part 1

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Right now the industry's service performance is really bad. Much of the responsibility lies with the venture capital owners and senior management. In particular there is this prevalent dotcom era notion that fibre equals value. It does not. What generates value are well managed, high performance assets generating a lot of revenue with lean overhead and happy customers. As a result, we are seeing builds by carriers that should be focusing on achieving excellent customer service and network performance, including provisioning. ***One major European long provider is quoting three month delivery of terrestrial 100G waves. They are aggressively expand their network, but apparently their venture owners forgot that the market does not highly value empty networks. On-net circuit provisioning should take two weeks. In exceptional cases as little as one week. It is hard for me to see why provisioning should take longer.  ***Customer service in general is an abomination. If there were a telec...