MasterStream Blog

Why Presence in Bandwidth Solutions Is More Important Than Owning Last-Mile Network

Written by Matt Clark - President, MasterStream ERP | Feb 11, 2021 5:45:00 PM

When it comes to maximizing telecom service availability to a single address or a group of addresses, telecom providers have typically viewed this effort as a war to win the “last mile” of connectivity for their customers.

While this last mile of service plays a central role in shaping telecom service and the larger customer experience, the rise of cloud-based services has resulted in an increased focus on “presence” as a feature of last-mile bandwidth solutions. This shift in relevance is a crucial consideration for telecom companies as they improve their process of connecting customers with the right services, and at the right price.

Tracking Availability’s Modern Evolution

More and more often, availability decisions for telecom businesses are being affected by the rise of enterprise applications, along with managed and other types of cloud-based services. Businesses seeking availability answers are looking beyond carrier-owned assets to find out if the solution providers behind mission-critical applications have a presence at a particular address, or a group of addresses.

Last-mile ownership has been a critical feature of telecom service to this day, giving enterprise organizations a single vendor to hold accountable for service quality. But the fragmentation of mission-critical applications, spanning both local and cloud-based servers, has altered the stakes when it comes to service quality. IT organizations now have so much investment in cloud-based solutions that they have no other option than to carefully scrutinize a solution provider’s presence.

This presence is key to ensuring access to applications even when one telecom channel is compromised. Increased presence reduces the risk of disruptions or slowdowns that cut off businesses from their applications, potentially halting their operations.

How Presence Affects Performance

Presence relates to a business or enterprise customer being able to understand what carriers have owned facilities at a particular set of locations, as well as what solution providers can service the same addresses through their underlying supplier relationships.

Understanding the true presence of both carrier and solution providers allows the buyer to make the best decisions that impacts the quality of their entire network—including access to cloud-based services—and keep their businesses functioning at top efficiency.

The calculations involved in understanding telecom presence are complex. Fortunately, presence can be quantified and compared through a tool like BandwidthFinder, making it easy to identify the networks with the strongest presence in a location—and, thus, the most reliable and expedient service. 

Improved Service Connection, Without Increased Labor

For telecom businesses resolved to evaluate presence through a manual process, the task of accounting for these different variables can be even more tedious than traditional processes used to evaluate availability for a given location. For this reason, telecom companies need access to modern availability tools that can automate this legwork, evaluating large data sets to facilitate fast, accurate representations of presence at a given location.

Automation also makes it possible to run the same evaluative process for a group of addresses, resulting in faster, comprehensive availability research that benefits enterprise organizations selecting service for more than one location. Through this fast, data-driven research, you can quickly generate and evaluate the presence of multiple bandwidth solutions serving a specific address.

Using Presence to Connect Service to Customers

By evaluating presence quickly through modern availability tools, telecom professionals and business subscribers can quickly identify the right service options for their use case based on the presence of both carriers and solutions providers at their locations.

See for yourself how an availability tool like BandwidthFinder improves your ability to evaluate presence and connect customers to relevant telecom services. Contact us for a free product tour today.