Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Pay salesmen low salaries and 5% to 10% of on-net revenue. A good salesman does not need a high salary. He or she achieves high income by selling. It is what they enjoy doing. This is the standard Wall Street broker compensation package. New brokers end up sharing apartments with lots of other brokers and commuting from New Jersey. Real sales meritocracy is pay for performance.  Profits are not maximized by paying a high salary combined with low commission rates, and high quotas. It simply creates huge staff turnover as people charm themselves into a high paying job, produce only one or two deals over their first six to 12 months, and then jump ship just before they are going to fired. I have seen it happen time and time again. The empty suit charmers. The resume red flag is a sales guy or gal moving from carrier to carrier every 1 to 2 years. The resulting churn from these bad apples dramatically lowers sales revenue per employee. Plus it rewards a few select salesmen who were luc...

Right now EUNetworks is clearly the best carrier for Layer 1 Western European network capacity. I work on a daily basis with them. The carrier offers the best combination of performance, price, and commercial flexibility. They are my default go-to provider. Note they offer wavelengths, spectrum, and metro dark fibre among other services. For ISPs they offer lower latency general bandwidth routes than their competitors. This is a big deal for African and Asian ISPs who already endure high latency to the distances between Europe and these other continents. Their new Digital Super Highways are quite attractive. These massive upgrades of the standard Western Europe routes give them a distinct edge over the 2000 era networks of their competitors. Arelion is the best transit provider, but Hurricane Electric should be a part of the upstream mix as well. RETN also has good transit. All three are in the top 15 ASN ranking which is a measure of the number of BGP links to other ISPs. These ...

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...