MasterStream Blog

In our current information age, it seems as if a day doesn’t go by when we don’t hear about countless networks in operation. These networks sprawl out like giant webs of wires, riding across telephone poles, through bodies of water, and underground to your building, home, or any other physical structure that utilizes telecommunications.

Up until the early 1980s, the Bell System owned all of the network capabilities. Thanks to deregulation, the monopoly they had established was broken up into several smaller companies, nicknamed “Baby Bells,” that provide local telephone services.

Advancements in technology have allowed local, national, and global communications to increase exponentially. Looking towards the future, communication needs are being met with $1.8 trillion in private sector investments in U.S. broadband infrastructure. With this influx comes more telecom provider options, so how should businesses go about choosing the right provider?

In the past, finding the right bandwidth solutions required a significant amount of time investment on the part of sales professionals. With today’s intelligence platforms, access to data information allows for a much easier research process that requires little more than an address from the researcher. Plus, it allows bandwidth providers to be found much more easily as well.

The internet has become infused into daily living and business operations. With 87 percent of people in the U.S. using the internet, a count that is expected to increase alongside increases in mobile devices and electronics markets, some argue that it should be considered a utility because it is essential for modern living.

For a long time, businesses seeking bandwidth services have delegated too many hours to researching bandwidth providers. These days, with the right tool, those hours that would have been dedicated to research can now be directed towards the business’s core competencies.

BandwidthFinder exists to make the bandwidth provider research process easier and faster for professionals in the telecom industry. All you need is an address to see which providers are available, and our algorithm quickly does all the work. Here’s how it works:

Worldwide, consumers and businesses have embraced the rapid growth of technology with more than 59 zettabytes of data captured in 2020 and an expected $3.7 trillion spent on information technology products by businesses in 2021. With these massive technology spending budgets, businesses are figuring out, first, what to do with the constant flow of information and, second, how to access it easily.

When performing bandwidth provider research online, a telecom salesperson is looking first and foremost for quick, relevant data. And for good reason: as part of the reported 2021 information technology product budget, businesses are expected to spend upwards of $704 billion on telecommunications systems.

As providers extend their network through underlying supplier relationships, the lines become blurred between who is a carrier and who is a solution provider. The truth is, almost every provider out there is buying last-mile connectivity through aggregation techniques to fill in the gaps of their network and provide a more holistic solution for customers on one bill.

From wired to wireless to fiber connectivity, diverse telecom channels and service options have greatly expanded the network presence capacity for both carriers and solution providers at any given address.

This is especially true when solution providers aggregate telecom service from carriers to combine disparate networks into a single service that leverages multiple points of connectivity. As providers expand their network through these techniques, it becomes more important to look at a provider's network presence instead of just their owned network facilities.

It’s both necessary and a major pain point for agents to connect customers to the best telecom services options at their address. Knowing whether a building is on-net or off-net helps determine the applicability of different service packages, but it isn’t always an easy task.

Comparing connectivity among a set of on-net and off-net service options can be a challenge with manual research processes that have limited data analytics capabilities. Even with the most robust database at your fingertips, the amount of legwork involved in researching can take a significant amount of time that might be better used elsewhere.

With so much variance in the data points available to represent these various service options, algorithmic research is the only way to reliably synthesize the data and accurately assess your options. This is especially true when conducting research across multiple addresses, which makes the task of on-net and off-net research even more complex and difficult to achieve without a qualitative research process powered by algorithmic software.

In this article, we expand on the many benefits of an algorithmic software to make your sales process more accurate, time-efficient, and immediate.

Manual serviceability research, which used to be a necessary cost of doing business for bandwidth providers, is tedious, time-consuming, and prone to error.

Fortunately, modern automation technology has transformed the way bandwidth providers do business, allowing them to take serviceability on the go with the right tools. In fact, thanks to automated serviceability research, the days of combing through data and staring at fiber maps may be entirely a thing of the past.

Fiber is often one of the most coveted forms of connectivity among telecom customers. But as a relatively new form of telecom infrastructure, fiber-optic access can be limited, depending on the customer’s location.

In cases where customers are seeking telecom services for a set of addresses, fiber-optic access may be fragmented, with only a percentage of those addresses able to connect with fiber service. In addition, presence is only one aspect of determining great fiber connectivity for a customer.

To fully evaluate fiber and determine which options offer the best fiber-optic access, telecom providers need to invest in research tools that can process complex fiber data and account for different variables that affect fiber performance. Here are some practical ways telecom businesses can connect their customers to the best fiber service possible.

Given the significant cost of building telecom infrastructure to serve a single market, telecom providers have to pick and choose where they build their own technology, and where they’re content to lease the use of infrastructure built and maintained by other providers—including their competitors.

In telecom, leasing of infrastructure to enable local network access is known as carrier aggregation, and it’s an important component of the business models for both carriers and solution providers.

Solution providers, for example, can use carrier aggregation to build a regional or nationwide network of telecom infrastructure. From there, the provider can use suppliers to lease access on a scale ranging from local markets and regions to individual buildings. Carriers, meanwhile, rely on aggregators as a demand driver to justify expanding their coverage area, increasing their market share in targeted regions.

Although carrier aggregation offers a lot of potential value to solution providers, the cost and resource investment of this process can be a significant obstacle for providers to clear without software solutions to simplify this process.

When performing telecom research online, the quality of your research is determined, first and foremost, by your ability to access relevant, quality data.

For bandwidth service providers, this important data comes in the form of public and private data sets that can be combined together to build a complete picture of bandwidth at any given address. As telecom sales professionals seek out the best bandwidth serviceability for their clients, they need the ability to access this full spectrum of data—and to sort and filter data to generate valuable insights relevant to any client’s needs

The right software tools can help your sales team and partners access public and private telecom data, bring disparate data together, and enable customized views to support efficient, accurate service—giving your business the insights it needs to optimize service configuration and quoting to meet your clients’ needs.

Here’s how an automated, data-connected tool like BandwidthFinder can support your research process.