Social Networking, Finally
Mar 10th
It is nice to see a few of the Carriers are catching up to the Social Networking tools, which people use everyday to communicate. The first of the year, I turned over a new leaf to come out and call out the Carriers who continue to bring back the dinosaur age, when it comes to customer service.  Unfortunately, I do not have enough posts to discuss the Carriers who are stepping up and delivering at a high level. I have been posting and naming Carriers for almost 6 months now. Not one as responded until now.Â
Level 3 was the first to respond to our frustrations at Intelletrace. After taking several days and sometimes weeks, to get back budgetary pricing, Level 3 delivered Intelletrace a pricing tool. After 5 years of working with Level 3, we were happy to hear from them. The pricing tool is easy to use and prices out their private line and Internet access products. The more you use it, the more you can build up the database, so it will see be just a point and click for quick pricing. It took 2 days after our post, for Level 3 to  deliver what we needed to service our customers. I guess that is the power of blogging, when it goes out to the world. Blogging is getting to be more powerful than escalating within the Carrier executive levels. Hmmm… I starting to get other ideas.
XO also responded quickly after a blog post. After an install which went South, our head Geek posted his frustrations and XO quickly responded. We quickly spoke with Executives and have set up meetings to see how we can work closer together. At Intelletrace, we rely on our Carriers to make us successful. Our Carriers, are just as important as our customers. We are amazed they are starting to respond to our need through the Social Networking channels. I hope we can resolve problems and strengthen the partnership through getting to know each other better.
Level 3 and XO are ahead of the game when it comes to getting to know their customers and communicating. We will see how long until the others catch up or continue to fall behind in the market place.
Viva Las Vegas
Feb 28th
Heading to Las Vegas for the 2010 Spring Channel Partner show. This show is great for networking, meeting consultants and agents across the country, and having fun.Â
Intelletrace relies on relationships, networking, and referrals to build our business. Intelletrace started as having a reputation as the “consultant’s consultant”. We work with consultants to resolve their customer’s problems and make it very easy for their customers to order new data and Internet services. Consultants love this, as we allow them to concentrate of the job their customer hired them for. The consultant does not have to worry about a Carrier providing a service which does not work properly.Â
Intelletrace also works with a select few of telecom agents. The reason we just do not work with any agent, Intelletrace wants to maintain a high quality reputation and a great service level for it’s agents.  Our agents can access our ON-NET building list at http://www.intelletrace.com/OnNet-Bulding-Search.html and all of our Agreements at http://www.intelletrace.com/Agreements.html for their customers to review easily.
When agents sign up with Intelletrace, they can be very confident in selling the Intelletrace solution to their customer. Agents will have access to our entire team, consisting of an Account Manager, Sales Engineer, and our Customer Service Department. Another great advantage Intelletrace provides their agents, is an unbiased opinion on which Carrier might be the best fit. Intelletrace is a neutral Carrier, with access to many networks and very competitive pricing for their Agents to get the deal done. The commission plan is also very flexible, where Agents can make all the way up to 20% residual.  Â
Looking forward to another great time in Vegas. Hope to see you there!
Advantages of Being a Neutral Carrier
Feb 23rd
Due to holidays and lots of snow in Lake Tahoe, I took a little break. I am back and busier than ever. Companies still need lots of bandwidth to handle their growing networks. Here is one story on why being a neutral Carrier and having access to many different fiber networks, has many advantages. Â
Recently Intelletrace provided a 200 meg point to point from Sacramento to Oakland. Near the end of the installation process, the Carrier Intelletrace chose, ran into problems of building out their fiber network to Sacramento. Our customer had deadlines. Intelletrace acted quickly to search out another Carrier who had capacity to meet our deadlines. We found Time Warner Telecom…  Time Warner Telecom recently have begun to build out their network in the Sacramento area over the last year and had plenty of capacity to fit our needs. However, we had deadlines. We were a little concerned if Time Warner Telecom could meet our deadlines. We needed to be turned up in 15 days. Most Carriers take 45 to 60 days to turn up a circuit of this size, even when they have capacity. Time Warner Telecom turned up and was ready to go within our deadlines.
I should also mention Time Warner Telecom also came through for us during the Thanksgiving holiday. This time it was a 5 day deadline. Time Warner Telecom came through with flying colors. Although, the Time Warner Telecom footprint is limited, I believe they have a very good niche in the marketplace. I look forward to doing more business with them.
Crush It!
Feb 10th
I just read a great book on building your brand on the web. “Crush It” by Gary Vanderchuk, holds nothing back. He tells his story on how he has built a multi-million dollar brand through determination, creativity, and long term goals. I highly suggest reading it, if you are interested in having an on-line presence and want to start building your own brand. Gary gives suggestions on where to start and step by step on what to do everynight to reach your goals. As long as your following your passion, you cannot fail.  Although, I am starting to enjoy blogging and expressing my opinions, especially after a very frustrating day in telecom, it sometimes can be tough to get the energy to start working at night after a long day. The next book I am reading is “The Six Pixels of Separation”. Another book on the power of the web, networking, blogging, and reaching out to millions of people. I will keep everybody updated on how it is.
Is this the Information Age?
Feb 2nd
I would say we are very much in the Information Age. With the power of the Internet, we are able to grab information almost seconds after an event has happened. When Northern California was hit with a powerful thunderstorm a couple of weeks ago, I woke up at 3am after I thought a bomb must of been dropped in my backyard. I quickly went downstairs, jumped on the Internet to find out what exactly had happened. Within minutes, I found out lightning had struck in Mill Valley (about 15 miles away from I live) and struck down a large tree.Â
If I can find out information about a thunderstorm within minutes, why in the world AT&T cannot provide customers circuit id’s, demarcation points, and expiration dates for their customers in a timely manner. I met with a client today, he has not once had met his sales engineer from AT&T and all of his technical questions are being answered by a sales person. Pretty scary, when you are relying on a sales person for technical info.  I am somewhat technical, but I would be the first to tell you I am not an engineer and will always bring in an Intelletrace engineer when customers want technical solutions. When it came it getting an audit on all of his circuits, it took almost a month for AT&T to provide this. Intelletrace has an online portal, where customer can gain instant access to all of their circuits, id’s, expiration terms, invoices, and trouble tickets.
This same client also has an Internet circuit with Qwest. After a 2 weeks, he is still waiting to get the information about his utilization. This information should be instant and not a mystery to their customers. How can customer manage their network and plan from growth if their Carrier cannot even give them information to assist them to plan? Intelletrace provides a portal so you can run reports on your bandwidth utilization real time.
I still find it hard to believe in the 21st century, businesses continue to fall behind and keep making the mistake that customers will continue to buy form them and keep coming back. Intelletrace recongnizes this and continues to work on making the customer experience simple and enjoyable. We now are utilizing the latest communication tools provided by social networking, online portals for managing bandwidth and tracking trouble tickets, and online fiber building lists.
We understand with PDAs and online tools, people are expecting information instantly. In the Information Age, they should!
Are You Following Yet?
Feb 1st
There was a major outage in Yuma, AZ today, lasting over six hours.  Many customers were affected, including several of Intelletrace’s. It was a Level3 fiber cut. We found out the hard way, Verizon Business was buying capacity from them, with no protect path. We also learned other Carriers were buying capacity from Level3. Unfortunately, Verizon Business was reselling a Level3 circuit, when we thought we were buying a complete Verizon Business circuit end to end. I will save for another blog. However, we did gain new followers including Verizon and Telepacific Support, on Twitter. We were giving real live updates with no fluff. For future outages, please follow us at @AskIntelletrace. Our support will tell it like it is and provide our customers real live updates of major outages. These outages might also affect you as well! Verizon Support would not give updates via Twitter regarding any updates. Verizon Support prefers our NOC to call into their Support and sit in a que for endless minutes. It seems like a waste of time and not a very useful way to communicate when a major outage occurs and multiple people are affected. Just think how many phone lines and use of resources would be available in major outages, when thousands of people can be reached in a tweet or a blog. We are communication companies and we need to continue to work on communicating more effectively with each other, especially with new applications being invented constantly.Â
Join our NOC or follow me @malciati and any product questions at @intelletrace on Twitter.
Working Together
Jan 31st
Recently Intelletrace and O1 Communications had met to see how we can work together to create a closer relationship and greater revenue for both companies. O1 has been a customer for almost 5 years, providing them Internet, backbone services, and custom data solutions.  O1 Communications is the leading vendor for Intelletrace when comes to Internet T1’s and MPLS T1 solutions in California. Not only is O1 Communications easy to work with, providing Intelletrace easy flat rate pricing for our sales team, but will provide short term services for special events. Also, O1 can deliver services in less than 10 days. O1’s install time frames seems unreal, when AT&T can not deliver services in less than 30 days, and it does not even leave their network.
O1 Communications is one of several Carriers, which Intelletrace sells to and buys from. The telecommunication market is a multi-billion dollar industry, and we always look to our customers first to provide services, instead of just buying from the big Carrier.
Intelletrace has recently started selling to one of these big Carriers, XO Communications, after being a growing customer of theirs for almost 6 years. Intelletrace is certainly going to start looking towards XO first now, when we believe they are a good solution for our customer. XO saw how a smaller Carrier can quickly act and be competitive to meet their customer’s needs. I encourage other larger Carriers to see this paradigm shift in the market place and see how they can do more business with other Carriers, beside the LEC (Local Exchange Carrier). I challenge every Carrier to start looking at ways to get of the box to provide a better service and solution for their customers.
Really… More than a week?
Jan 27th
How does Level 3 continue to stay in business? We are going on a week of them still not getting back to us on pricing for an Internet circuit that does not leave their own network. Most Carriers have a pricing tool or flat rate pricing for all circuits which are completely are on their network. Verizon Business and Global Crossing make it easy, when we have Internet opportunities at their IP POPs. Both Carriers give us a flat rate and due to our volume, they actually decrease our pricing as we continue to add bandwidth.
Get a hint…Make it easy for people to do business… Sprint kept asking me for years how to get more business from Intelletrace. I had one answer which Sprint could not understand, “Make it easy to price and sell!”. Sprint is still playing catch up with most Carriers.�
Back to Level 3… They are the only Big Carrier who does not have a pricing tool for their services or flat rate pricing. Level 3 continues to fall behind and misses out on opportunities. Level 3 cannot continue to do business this way if they are going to stay around. Verizon Business even gives us flat rate pricing for services which leaves their network. An amazing concept… This enables Intelletrace to turn around quotes quick and most of the time chooses Verizon Business because of this.  People move very fast in telecom. Intelletrace cannot afford to continue waiting for vendors to get back to us, when we expect to get to all of our customers with pricing in 24 hours. Now I do expect pricing for large capacity circuits, such as 2.5gig or 10gig to take a little longer, as this is a new service which has only been around a few years and most backbones are still being built out to accept these type of services easily. Companies must continue to improve their systems and need to move faster if they want to continue to be ahead of their competition and grow in the market place.
How do these Carriers sell anything?
Jan 21st
We are going on 3 months now in trying to get a circuit re-designed for a customer and waiting over 3 weeks for pricing. Holiday Season is over, it is time to get back to work. Qwest is the lame Carrier today, which is moving at the pace of a snail in the very fast moving world of telecom.
We have a 10gig circuit from San Jose to Seattle, which has multiple maintenance windows and multiple outages. Unfortunately, the circuit is still not considered chronic yet, it is practically unusable. Qwest continues to stall and continues to make excuses on finding a new path which is usable. It is unbelievable and I am sick and tired of it. Qwest only has two paths from San Jose to Seattle, so they do not have much too choose from.�
I am also waiting for them to get me firm pricing for a direct connection on a 2.5gig, which we need to move on. Sure Qwest got me the monthly cost, which only took about 2 weeks, but still it has not got me the build costs for the direct connect and splicing. What are they waiting for? From my understanding, their is not a lot of new construction going on, so what is the hang up? Sure they got me a budgetary price, but what does that mean. Does Qwest expect us to sign up for a new service, which they can change the pricing on us and stick us for another 36 months for a circuit that is too expensive and possibly unusable. This is exactly why I left the big Carriers. As they continually move at a dinosauric pace, Intelletrace is moving at light speed to meet the customer demand for SERVICE.
The Bait and Switch
Jan 20th
I am sure this has happened to most people when shopping for a car, but this often happens in telecom. Today it happened again…. This time it was Level 3. I requested their new FastPath. They met my target price and had two deals pending. I even questioned Level 3 on the route, latency, and mileage. My rep confirmed we were all good, however, when I requested the Service Level Agreement, that is when the stalling started to happen. I asked repeatedly, why Level 3 cannot produce a SLA for a service they have already sold.  My customer was ready to pull the trigger and was happy to see Intelletrace come through again for them. 24 hours had gone by and the phone call came, “Sorry Marc, our pricing group made a mistake and gave Intelletrace the wrong price”. Not only was I pissed, but I had to go back to my customer and greatly apologize.  How can Level 3 make this mistake? This is not the first time this has happened to me, but it hurts the most. Had two large deals pending which would have got our year off to a very good start. Unbelievable!!!
Marc Alciati
Age: 42
Gender: Male
Industry: Telecommunications
Occupation: President CEO
Location: Novato : CA : United States
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