MasterStream Blog

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.

In the worst of times, telecom customers have been forced to find connectivity options at addresses where no telecom service has been connected in the past—meaning there’s always a small risk that their preferred service option will face an obstacle to installation.

In the best of times, customers have an abundance of choices that include telecom connectivity through existing infrastructure, as well as the ability to connect to service options by installing new infrastructure or connecting to wireless service.

These two scenarios illustrate one of the basic differences between on-net and off-net connectivity. On-net service, which refers to a carrier that owns network facilities at a specific location, is already connected at that location. By contrast, off-net connectivity refers to a solution provider that has connected to the location by purchasing use of the local network facility through a supplier relationship. As a result, off-net connectivity can involve more unknown and hard-to-identify variables that may affect not only connectivity, but also service quality at an address.

Although the worst-case scenario with off-net connection options may be scary to some customers, the good news is that strong telecom research automation can help you better understand these connectivity options before customers commit to a service option. As a result, telecom businesses can thoroughly evaluate connectivity and score service package options to avoid worst-case scenarios and give customers the type of telecom service they’re seeking at their locations.

Here are some key differences to emphasize as your customers weigh their options between on-net and off-net telecom connections.

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.

When connecting customers to the best service options at their address, the difference between on-net and off-net buildings can be a big one. Service packages and the overall configure price quote (CPQ) process need to know whether any telecom services are on-net at a given location, whether it’s a carrier you represent or a competitor in the local market.

For our purposes in this article, “on-net” refers to a carrier that owns network facilities at a particular location. “Off-net” refers to a solution provider that connects the location to their own network by purchasing the network facility through a supplier relationship.

Many consumers and businesses may not think about on-net versus off-net properties when choosing a location, but the availability of these services can have a big impact on both the services and service package pricing that makes sense for these customers. Here are six things you should know about the differences between on-net and off-net buildings.

Data stacks provide an essential service in organizing data sets to store information and support easy management and processing of this data. But the infrastructure of these data stacks can vary widely, depending on the supporting software behind them.

Outdated or limited data stacks can create limitations for what you’re able to achieve through these structures, especially when it comes to evaluating bandwidth solutions and performing other essential services as a telecom business.

If you’re working with an existing data stack that requires a lot of manual lifting and restricts your data processing capabilities, you might be able to improve your telecom customer experience by upgrading the data stacks used in your bandwidth solutions.

Here are some of the benefits that can come with swapping out your data stacks.

The growing pains brought on by digital transformation aren't endured just for the sake of putting businesses through unprecedented challenges. While the transition to these new solutions is often a gradual and sometimes difficult process, the end result of digital transformation provides benefits made possible only through modern solutions to long-standing configure, price, quote (CPQ) telecom problems.

This transformation is alleviating multiple pain points and limitations that have plagued telecom providers for years—and which have only gotten worse as telecom infrastructure has grown more complex. To keep pace with both the expectations of customers and the task of managing complexity around CPQ telecom services, new technologies are taking an algorithmic and rules-based approach that is necessary to build a sustainable telecom business model.

Here are four CPQ telecom technologies solving these pressing industry challenges.